Sorry Please Thank You

May 14, 2012
In his new story collection, Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe) draws from both sci-fi and literature to conjure a world of emotionally stunted people, unable or unwilling to cope with reality and the love or loss that it entails. With somewhat mixed results, the book charts eclectic territory, from a zombie in a megamart to a new pharmaceutical drug that generates a sense of purpose, and explores retreats from reality and emotion. In “Standard Loneliness Package,” Yu imagines a technology that transfers guilt, heartbreak, and other bad feelings onto the employees of an “emotional engineering firm” based in India. In “Adult Contemporary,” which recalls George Saunders, a man trying to buy a new life realizes that he’s a character in someone else’s story. Less successful stories delve into the workings of fiction itself; Yu wrestles with ethics as he imagines himself as a character struggling against his author in “Human for Beginners.” At their best, the tales amusingly send up American consumer culture, but Yu’s fondness for self-reference and literary games leads to some dead ends. While Yu’s imaginative allegories are mostly too obvious to be genuinely thought provoking, they’re nonetheless an impressive sendup of contemporary life. Agent: Gary Heidt, Signature Literary Agency.

July 1, 2012
Science fiction goes postmodern in this story collection from Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 2010, etc.). Using various narrative strategies (though all but one of these 13 stories is written in the first person), Yu explores provisional identities (including those of a character named Charles Yu) in multiple universes, typically employing a conversational style that makes for easy reading even when the themes are troubling or the formalistic elements challenging. In one story, "Note to Self," a writer begins writing "Dear Alternate Self," before the response he receives suggests that his alternate self may simply be another dimension of himself, and then, later, that the person to whom he's actually writing is the reader: "We are correspondents corresponding in our corresponding universes. Is that what writing is? A collaboration between selves across the multiverse?" Where some stories just seem like gamesmanship, literary parlor tricks, one of the shorter and best ones, "Open," strikes an existential chord in its meditation on words and what they signify, in its epiphany that "It was like we were actors in a play with no audience." A couple stories offer heroic epics for the video game generation, while the longest, "Human For Beginners," begins as a chapter in a self-help book on dynamics within extended families, proceeds into an inquiry on the identity of Charles Yu, and culminates in unanswerable questions such as "What is possible? What is conceivable? Do all worlds have rules? Do dreams?" A collection of playful stories that often have a dark undercurrent. Far out, man.

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February 1, 2012

Expect the author of the weirdly imaginative How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe to come up with stories that are...weirdly imaginative. Here, a company outsources grief for profit ("Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you"), and an employee working the night shift at a big-box store has an easier time with a zombie than the girl he wants to date. Since Science Fictional Universe was a New York Times Notable Book, a Discover and Indie Next pick, no. 22 on Amazon's Top 100 of 2010, and more, this should get attention; with a five-city tour.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2012
In his buzzed-about debut, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), Yu experimented with literary narration in a digressive novel about time travel. His whimsically sad and comically inventive first story collection delivers more of his satiric obsession with nerd culture and science as he explores losers, loners, and lovers in the digital age. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company speaks before potentially soon-to-be-laid-off employees about the company's research into depression. A space officer whose wife is expecting their first child is promoted to yeoman, a position with a job description that implied he'll die during his first week. An unhappily married couple discovers a door in their apartment that leads to an alternate reality where they theoretically experience happiness. And in the title story, a desperate man pens a suicide note to a hypothetical lover in the hopes that someone will long for him, if even only posthumously. Yu's bold, playful voice evokes a computer-era Donald Barthelme, but his stylistic journey into the vast universe that is the human mind is refreshingly distinctive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)