Benjamin Percy: Refreshing

I once heard a senior editor at a publishing house say that book reviews, even in major newspapers and magazines, have a negligible impact on a book’s sales (and went on to cite figures that showed hardly a hump in sales numbers, much less a spike, in the week after the review). That’s myopic and ill-calculated. It ignores how people gain knowledge about an author and their long-term buying habits. For instance, virtually no single review will make me buy a book – but if I read a review and then read two blogs and read an interview, all within a certain time frame, then I’m propelled to buy the book. And if I don’t buy it at that point – for any number of reasons – then three or six or nine months down the road, or maybe even a year or three later, when browsing online or in a store, I might pick it up. It’s all about the confluence of multiple sources that mentally lock in an author’s name for future reference. Reviews happen to be one of those sources.

That said, I’ve recently experienced a kind of confluence with the short story writer Benjamin Percy. Poets and Writers has an article (not available online) that profiles him in quite a favorable light, and the LA Times just reviewed his new collection “Refresh, Refresh.” On that wave I read Bookslut’s very recent interview with him (he has a blue-collar ruggedness which is quite endearing).

Apparently, his stories buy meds online involve hyper-masculinity and (the latest one, at least) the fall-out on families from the Iraq War. Also, throw in some weird caves and meteor holes. Here’s an excerpt, just so I can hook you like I’ve been hooked:

Many years ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us, and during the summer by bearded geologists from OSU interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the sky—no moon, only stars—just a little lighter black than a crow. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness. In the near distance the grayish green glow of Tumalo dampened the sky—a reminder of how close we came, fifty years ago, to oblivion. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind at just the right moment could have jogged the meteor sideways, and rather than landing here, it could have landed there, at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Tumalo High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out the sky and change everything.

Read the rest of the excerpt at the publisher’s site, Graywolf Press.