Stephen O'Connor

O’Connor’s rich collection of short stories is fantastical, realistic, mythical, and absurd, encompassing the afterlife, the imagined life, Eden, purgatory, and a kind of rethought reality. In the opening story, “Ziggurat,” the Minotaur develops a crush on a peanut-colored girl who has wandered into his section of the Labyrinth and is to be his next victim. In “Love,” a flighty young woman decamps to her father’s cabin with her recent boyfriend and becomes convinced that a stranger is stalking them in the woods. Charles, the “Professor of Atheism,” who appears in six stories, is befuddled by his transformation from a fringe academic to a lauded scholar and even more surprised when he vacations in Eden. O’Connor shrewdly allows his readers to walk the line between reality and fantasy, blurring the boundaries between two worlds.

— Heather Paulson

Everyday people are stalked by strangeness in this artfully bemusing story collection.


It’s been two decades since the publication of Rescue, O’Connor’s debut collection, but his affinity for quirky premises clearly remains undiminished. A recurring set of stories features a “professor of atheism” who’s presented with seeming evidence of the afterlife—a set of angel’s wings, a paradisial retreat, his resurrected father. In “Based on a True Story,” a man is asked to play himself in the movie of his life, and he wrestles with his feelings toward the woman who is playing his wife with unsettling accuracy. In “Disappearance And,” a man is told the precise time of his death by a bird and spends his final hours deciding how to end his life with dignity. O’Connor’s taste for unusual setups resembles that of George Saunders, but O’Connor is a more bleakly critical writer, and the bulk of his stories seem designed to reveal how ill-equipped we are to deal with mortal concerns. The beautifully turned “White Fire,” for instance, is narrated by a soldier newly arrived home from Iraq, and his casual, staccato language—dotted with many utterances of “like” and “so then”—belies just how much fear he carries with him. Similarly, the protagonist of “Love” heads to a cabin retreat to work on her dissertation (on child abuse, forebodingly enough), and her paranoia about her boyfriend’s fidelity transmogrifies into terror that she’s being stalked. The power in these stories emerges from O’Connor’s style, which can be as controlled and elegant as John Updike’s but which serves a very different purpose; instead of stressing the strangeness of the premise of “Ziggurat,” about the relationship between a minotaur and a video-game-obsessed girl, the author emphasizes its normalcy, making the story feel surprisingly realistic. And pure realism is easily within O’Connor’s grasp too: “Aunt Jules” is a simple but deeply affecting story about a woman’s relationship with her sister and brother-in-law, with whom she had a brief fling. The author places it at the end of the book, as if to suggest that normalcy is the strangest, toughest trick of all.


A beguiling collection that merges off-kilter concepts and classic style.

The impossibility of balancing desire and its fulfillment lies at the center of many of these inventive stories. They range from fabulistic to realistic, and the best ones retain a vague fealty to reality, though the alternate worlds visited are sketched with a skewed, knowing hand, as with "Ziggurat," a droll, slightly disorienting account of the Minotaur in his labyrinth. The mythical monster displays only scorn for his victims until he develops a crush on his latest victim, who diverts him through flattery, cajolery, sharing beers, and teaching him to play pool. Elsewhere, Charles, "the professor of atheism," appears in six stories and skewers the outsized egos of academics even as his own is gratified in the most unlikely ways--before, that is, wry resolutions render each reward a less than ideal outcome. Charles's scholarship is adored; he vacations in Eden; and he eventually confirms his own worst, narcissistic fears. O'Connor (Rescue) is a wizard at engendering sympathy for his characters, who are often simply trying to make sense of situations less certain and comfortable than they might wish. (Aug.)

"The Professor of Atheism"
from Here Comes Another Lesson

"The Professor of Atheism" series in Stephen O'Connor's second collection recurs like a running gag in between the other stories. Each entry launches from a simple premise: Charles, a washed-up, mediocre atheist, finds himself in theological situations. He acquires a pair of angel wings and is born again in the Garden of Eden. O'Connor imagines the glory of religious miracles as something mundane and heaven as a world of heartbreak and lowered expectations. Charles is an existential Wile E. Coyote in a series of sublime metaphysical cartoons.

--Paul Constant

[T]he best collection of stories I’ve read so far this year... A story about a minotaur and a video-game-obsessed girl bumps against a story about an Iraq War vet’s first difficult day home, both of which are placed alongside a series of seriocomic tales about a “professor of atheism” arrived in (perhaps) heaven. O’Connor can be satirical, but not in the kind of consistently arch way that marks, say, a George Saunders collection. O’Connor is simply acrobatically capable of finding the style appropriate for each story—and his fanciest trick is the closing “Aunt Jules,” an expansive story about two sisters where the conflict and style are utterly familiar and conventional, but no less successful for that.

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The main lesson of this book is that there are still fiction writers out there brave enough to take serious risks. For O'Connor, the risks pay off lavishly. Here is a collection of great feeling, range and power.

—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

When an accounting is done of our bravest and most inventive writers of the short story, Stephen O’Connor’s name must certainly be on the list.

—Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women

Each story in O'Connor's brilliant collection is a sunrise--a radiant apparition from beyond the outermost limits of ordinary language. Some stories are gritty, realist and spare, others feel lightning-charged with an otherworldly intensity, shockingly inventive but also frighteningly familiar, surprising and true.

—Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

These are amazing, fearless stories—wild dreamscapes that take place in our very own world, with its murderous brutality, impenetrable mystery, and tender beauty. Whether he’s working in the fantastic or the familiar, O’Connor is an artist of the unpredictable, a supreme talent.

—Joan Silber, author of The Size of the World

In these odd, funny, touching stories Stephen O'Connor plants himself in a great tradition of surrealist writers. He's not afraid to take whacky risks with his material and move us at the same time. I don't say this lightly but there's a through line from Gogol to Kafka to O'Connor - writers who find that the seemingly ordinary and everyday can be the strangest thing of all.

—Mary Morris, author of Revenge

The world as conjured by Stephen O’Connor--with its apocalyptic skies, its extravagant dispensations of feeling, its beautiful bestiaries full of minotaurs, untenured professors, and other lonely big-headed creatures—may feel like some wondrous dream, a funhouse mirror for our most primal yearnings and fears. But it’s neither more nor less strange than our own. For all their riotous warps and woofs, these stories achieve an aching reality, a full-throated human-ness rare in American fiction. Like all the best art they can’t be summarized, only experienced. So what are you waiting for?

—Robert Cohen, author of Amateur Barbarians

“Love,” my favorite in this book of wonderful stories, says it all about the author, who exhibits throughout this collection a true mastery of the form; along the way, Mr. O'Connor, in his passion for language and story telling, not only forms a bond between the reader and himself, but leaves one with a feeling of gratitude—and yes, perhaps, even an affection—for his gifts.

—Oscar Hijuelos, author of Beautiful Maria of My Soul

RESCUE

In "The Afterlife of Lytton Swain," one of several striking stories in this first collection by Stephen O'Connor, the Rev. Lytton Swain gradually adapts to a nether world where he can order a cup of coffee in a diner, casually pocket a severed finger found on the ground, and exchange pleasantries with Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell. The terrain is familiar, yet filled with discomfiting "inconsistencies," causing him "to suspect that it was not his mind, but reality itself that was wandering." A sense of wandering reality pervades most of these startlingly inventive stories...
--The New York Times Book Review

Stephen O'Connor is one of several promising young artists...who are using surrealism not to bypass our dulling consciousness in search of a deeper truth, but to avoid the limitations of traditional story-telling...
--The Los Angeles Times

This is a variety show of 14 very different stories by a new New York author who switches styles and voices with the ease of a quick-change artist...
--The Seattle Times

WILL MY NAME BE SHOUTED OUT?

How many issues are more important than the failure of our schools to produce new generations of Americans who can perform the basic tasks of postindustrial society? Alarms need to be sounded regularly, and Mr. O'Connor performs that service in a clear, straightforward voice... To Mr. O'Connor, the crisis in American education is not "a simple matter of inadequate standards and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy." Ask any teacher to name the No. 1 problem, he says, and it would be the "relentless intrusion into the classroom of the social problems that the students suffer both out on the streets and in their own homes."...
--The New York Times Book Review

In this thoughtful and ambitious account... teacher Stephen O'Connor details his efforts to do in New York City what every conscientious English teacher hopes to do: "make writing matter in the real world, generate student writing that has political and social importance, writing that makes the world we live in a wiser, kinder, and better place."... [E]ven though the plays that came from O'Connor's classes were triumphantly crafted and staged, one can't come away from reading his book without feeling that we are barely holding on in our urban schools, and that inner-city schools in particular are barely surviving the most traumatic social, political, racial and financial pressures placed on them in this century. It's also painfully obvious that there are not enough teacher-heroes of O'Connor stature to prop up the system much longer."
--The Minneapolis Star Tribune

ORPHAN TRAINS: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

For some 80 years the orphan trains described in Stephen O'Connor's book took stray and destitute children from New York's grim slums to the countryside, where they were chose by farmers, artisans and merchants fro employment or adoption. The scenes Mr. O'Connor evokes seem strange by today's standards: hundreds of newly transported children, most of them boys, being picked by strangers for what was intended to be redemptive labor, a new life-saving chance. And yet, as Mr. O'Connor points out in "Orphan Trains," his insightful and fascinating piece of social history, that practice, which lasted until about 1930, was the immediate predecessor of today's foster care system...
--The New York Times (daily)

...O'Connor's immensely readable book vividly portrays Brace and the world in which he operated. "Orphan Trains" not only offers us a trip to the past but provides historical context crucial to understanding and evaluating present-day attitudes and policies about poverty, families and children.
--The Los Angeles Times

...The most charismatic of these [19th century social reformers and] thinkers was Charles Loring Brace, enthrallingly portrayed in Mr. O'Connor's "Orphan Trains"..."
--The Wall Street Journal