Annihilation for Beginners - by Charlie J Stephens (Paperback)

About the Book

Award-winning novelist Charlie J. Stephen's debut story collection observes childhood, parenthood, and selfhood with rare honesty and endearing good humor.

Book Synopsis

The debut story collection from Oregon Book Award finalist Charlie J. Stephens, Annihilation for Beginners, generously explicates Jean-Paul Sartre's missive that "life begins on the other side of despair." In 28 short stories, including a supernatural small-town mystery, a multigenerational family drama, and a maternal love story, the book considers what secular hope in the Anthropocene might look like. A child finds affinity with mollusks, a couple takes experimental drugs at the cemetery, a reptile-averse mother lets her son adopt a snake, and aging queer activists seek divinity. These are stories that ask: how strong is the tether keeping us here? How does the certainty of death animate our lives? Throughout the many microclimates of Oregon, the collection navigates themes of belonging, connection, the constructs of gender, and how adults and children understand one another. These stories are full of families trying to be families, and people in all phases of life reckoning with their reasons for living. With scenery and interiority that echo each other, and characters that read Camus, Fanon, and De Beauvoir, Annihilation for Beginners is slyly philosophical and darkly funny at every turn.

Review Quotes

"Sometimes you find a book that stays with you-one that delights as much as it haunts. I loved every single page of Annihilation for Beginners." -Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West

"Charlie J. Stephens is a bard of the Oregon coast, the Willamette River, the people left behind and the people doing the leaving, the transplants to the city's edges, the birds and deer and trees, the broken link between human and humane. This is a book about queer solitude and dreaming, the potential of friendship, the persistence of childhood longing, and what it means to grow. Each story stands on its own, while together they build up to a crescendo of conflicting feelings, 'the momentum underneath everything.'" -Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl

"Charlie Stephens's people are precisely the people we need right now-complex, compassionate, queer, courageous, and just a little bit sick of the way people focus on what is entirely beside the point. They have what the wise old woman who raised me would have called gumption. I would follow this writer into any dark woods." -Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country

"These solid, beautiful stories break open like exquisite geodes. Populated by a spectrum of characters who find themselves in less-than-ideal situations and locations, Annihilation for Beginners shows us that beneath our rough exteriors, eroded by loss and longing, often lie hidden, tender interiors shaped by a desire to know ourselves and how we fit into the vast, unknowable world that surrounds us." -Evan P. Schneider, author of Rural Education

"Stephens's sensitivity to nature and the human condition is exactly what this world needs. These stories mesmerize and hold you, even when everything feels impossibly damp and socked in. You'll laugh, cry, and emerge remembering that it isn't so bad to be a human being-so full of hope and so full of wonder." -Erin Steele, author of Sunrise over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia