The World Doesn't Work That Way, But It Could, Volume 1: Stories (New Oeste) - Hardcover

Murray, Yxta Maya

 
9781948908696: The World Doesn't Work That Way, But It Could, Volume 1: Stories (New Oeste)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1948908697 ISBN 13: 9781948908696
Verlag: UNIV OF NEVADA PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

One of the Best Books of 2020, Buzzfeed News

The Millions' Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half of 2020 Book Preview

The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray&;s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret.

The characters in these stories grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. The stories explore not only our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil, but also reveal our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yxta Maya Murray is an art critic, author, and law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, CA. She has won a Whiting Writer's Award and an Art Writer's Grant. She was a finalist for the ASME Fiction Award in 2019. Her work has been published in Artforum, Aperture, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other magazines.

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Miss USA 2015

The problem we had was with the two walks, bathing suit and gown. The body, it was workable. Good breasts, tight stomach, okay height. But the legs, no. The legs had issues also. A saddlebag issue, just a hint of it, but by competition we had her on nothing but water and lemon and squats and you can't ask for more. And she was too old. Twenty- four. I don't know how she won her State except that she did a great interview. She came to me in January and so we only had six months. It was insane. By February we had already lightened her and Donnie got her new teeth and Botox and fillers. We ripped the accent and the trailer park from her personality with elocution and poise training. And she was smart. That's what she had going for her. Just a natural smart and reading newspapers all the time for the political questions. And she was Black and Latina, which the judges find confusing. So we just said Black. But of course we did the hair.

No, the problem was the walk. I could see it right away. She stomped into my office in Florida, bumping her buns through my door with a big smile like she had no idea how wrong she is. She wore this yellow dress with a big frill on it that made her look like a one- winged chicken. Her mother had come along, a beautiful Tapatia maybe forty- three years old, with fantastic legs and a tiny waist and dragging in two other kids. They'd driven sixteen hours in their Plymouth for the meeting. There was the big brother, about twelve years old, and the littler brother, about two years old. The older one was dark and the younger one came out lighter but they both had the same round grumbly faces. The mother looked exhausted, and no wonder, with the two sons and then this one with the attitude. The family sat quietly on my sofa, staring at the framed photographs and the citations from the city I have on my wall. Me, I had my silver hair clipped into a very chic drop fade crew cut. I also wore black bespoke Dege & Skinner trousers in a light vicuña, a purple smoking jacket, bespoke cotton Charvet shirting accented by a silk purple Charvet foulard, and Church's slippers. For a second I could see the mother looking at me and not understanding what she's seeing.

Who cared, though, because the girl, she stood in the middle of my suite like she's Pat Cleveland or Beverly Simpson or the great oh my God Donyale Luna. She didn't look at the pictures of the other girls or the framed key to the city. She stuck her boobs out and swayed the back and so you could see she knew nothing. But she stared at me like she's an Empress and I'm her slave. So I liked that.

"I want you to make me Miss USA," she said.

"I don't know," I said, looking at the legs.

"You are going to make me Miss USA," she went on like she didn't hear me. She walked over to her mother. The mother opened her purse and took out some cash and gave it to her. The girl held the money like it's a billion dollars and then walked back over to me and gently put it in my hand. "You have twenty- seven weeks."

"Sssssssssss," I said, shaking my head, because I'd been watching her walk, of course.

"'15 is mine, and you're going to help me," she said. Her eyes shot fireballs and lightning storms all over the room so that I wanted to drop to the floor and kiss her feet.

I gave her the money back. "Go back to - " you know, the place she came from, is what I said. I can't tell you which one I'm talking about. It was Miss USA, 2015. We sign an NDA and they sign one, too. I wouldn't tell you anyway. In any case, I already had my hands full with another USA contestant who was at the top level, and plus the franchises. By franchises I mean the life coaching and model schools, the ones I advertise in Glamour and on youtube. I don't make money from stars or would- be stars like you, the winners are my branding. I earn from the hundreds and thousands of chubs who have the fantasy that they are going to be like Ali Landry or Gretchen Carlson, but really, they're just going to learn how to stop chewing with their mouths open and attract a man. So I was busy already, and this girl who came to see me was very pretty and beautiful, but she had a five buck strut. So I told her to go back home and make do with the broke- ass coaches she already fired.

"You big, huge, bald, old vaca," she said, getting all heated up.

She started yelling at me in Spanish that I was the brokest of all broke asses and she wouldn't let me coach her now if I crawled on my stomach and pleaded like a dog. The boys started crying. I cursed back at her in German and French, which are the scariest- sounding languages I know. The mother's crying. The girl's crying. Now even I'm wiping my eyes because I could see they're poor as pigeons and all surviving on whatever dimes and nickels her sponsor gave her after she won her ribbon.

"Walk over there," I said. She walked over there, so bad. "You are the worst walker I've ever seen in my life," I said. "It's like you got six feet."

"You'll teach me," she said. "Walk over there," I said. She walked over there.

"Even worse," I said.

I begin sashaying. "Walk like this."

She starts waddling all over the place with a fat walk.

"Oh my Jesus," I said.

She's walking around my office like a panda and the mother's still crying and the boys, too.

And then the girl strikes a pose, a profile, and I almost fainted again.

"No misdemeanors or felonies?" I said. Because there are rules, you know that, right? Qualifications. "And you have no man in your life?"

"That's Miss America," she said. "I can date."

"Not if you want to win," I said. Which is true. "Also, no disease? No children? No divorce? No annulment? Not pregnant? You have to do your own makeup and hair, so that it is perfect. You can be 18-27 only. They like it if you have a G.E.D. or diploma."

"Yes, yes, yes," the girl said.

"High school diploma?" I asked.

"G.E.D.," she said. "And remember, I won State already. I'm checked out."

"Your state is the dumps," I said. "Plus, I heard every story before, I trust nobody and nothing."

"I got the papers in the car. Health, too."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?"

"I don't know," I said. "Walk over there again."

She thumped around this way and that but all the time smiling at me like she could eat me down to the bones and still want more.

"Hm," I said.

As I mentioned already I had another contestant in that year. The lady was a much better shot, from a bigger state. She was a beautiful White woman, or White enough when you dyed her. The package. She'd turned twenty- one the month previous, and ticked the other boxes with height and perfect turns. She could talk great and projected just fabulous, with that kind of fantasy Park Avenue class but very sexual, which can sell depending on whether that year the judges want erotic versus more innocent. Plus the blonde had grown up low- income and abused, but she'd still got a computer science degree from an Ivy. And she advocated for the disabled, so, she had that, too.

I took this new one on, anyway, because of the way she made fires and flames with her eyes. I started calling her my girl right away as a kind of joke because she was just...

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Verlag
UNIV OF NEVADA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1948908697
ISBN 13 
9781948908696
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
296
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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