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YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

Mary South

Stories

In her debut collection, Mary South's characters use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves. These 10 stories feature an impressive range of voices, alternatingly provocative, wistful, and calculatingly disaffected in prose that is fiercely intelligent and outlandishly funny.
Old men in a nursing home dial phone-sex hotlines to stave off their debilitating loneliness in "The Great Geezer Dirty Talk Disaster of the Twenty-First Century." In "Architecture for Monsters," (previously published in Conjunctions), an architect draws dubious ethical inspiration from her daughter's birth defect for the buildings she designs. Embroiled in the custody battle of a nasty divorce, a husband and wife take turns ripping each other apart in an annotated Microsoft Word letter to their kids in "The Last Real American Divorce." And in the title story, a content moderator for Google is obsessed with stalking her rapist's online activity, so much so that she starts stalking him in real life. South explores how the Internet both collapses our relationships from within but also provides opportunities for connection. Savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these stories also offer hope in the minute interactions and moments of tenderness between characters. Akin to the formally inventive as well as darkly absurdist style of Carmen Maria Machado or Alissa Nutting, South's stories reveal both our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance; our psychic pain that shuts us off from each other but also allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. Mary South is a graduate of Northwestern University and the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University where she was a Henfield Scholar. She has studied with Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, and Gordon Lish, and worked alongside Diane Williams for many years as an editor at the literary journal NOON. Her writing has appeared in The Collagist, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, The New Yorker's "Book Bench," NOON, and Words Without Borders.
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Published 2020-03-01 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Comments

South's stories are both funny and profound, often on the same page, but perhaps her best skill is plumbing the intricacies of loneliness, expertly dissecting what that term means in a technology-driven world. This is an electric jolt from a very talented writer.

[A] collection of ten dark and crystalline stories that announces the arrival of a distinct voice in contemporary fiction... South offers a sardonic humor that underscores the absurdity in the way we live... You Will Never Be Forgotten has arrived at the right time: with most Americans confined indoors and spending more and more hours in front of our screens, there is value in a story collection that makes us stop and question just what these screens have wrought in our lives.

What a heady, delicious, devastating collection. These stories, in their limitless wit and invention, begin as satisfying intellectual puzzles and then bloom into something fiercer, wilderexpanding to contain the fullness of dread, loss, longing, shame, terror. Mary South has written a tremendous book.

Mary South's stories are a vital mix of wry humor, cunning provocation, disturbing prophecy and deep feeling. A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut.

South's vibrant collection is awash with zinging sentences, formal creativity, and conceptual verve. The writer both grounds her tales in precise contemporary detail and infuses her language with incredible imagination.

O Magazine calls it one of March's best books - "Imagine Black Mirror by way of Karen Russell and you'll get a sense of this mordant and wondrous collection of short fiction"

Mary South's wickedly, exquisitely hilarious collection dwells in the intimate aches of modern life, writ large in strange, delightful stories that include, but are not limited to, clones, brain surgery, internet trolls, and warehouses full of spare men. Dazzlingly imagined and full of wit, You Will Never Be Forgotten is a gift to readers everywhere, a ferocious transmission from one of the most audacious, most original new voices in fiction.

Written with dark humor... South's precise, morally unburdened prose allows ample room for an exploration of the limitations of caregiving and the oft-futile human desire to rescue others... You Will Never Be Forgotten is a haunting reminder that grief, whether as a part of our current, sobering reality or as a constant condition of humanity, will thwart our attempts to control it.

Picador bags short stories and novel from Mary South Read more...

Mary South's wickedly, exquisitely hilarious collection dwells in the intimate aches of modern life, writ large in strange, delightful stories that include, but are not limited to, clones, brain surgery, internet trolls, and warehouses full of spare men. Dazzlingly imagined and full of wit, You Will Never Be Forgotten is a gift to readers everywhere, a ferocious transmission from one of the most audacious, most original new voices in fiction.

YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN is mentioned in Publishers Weekly's Spring 2020 Announcement: "In South's playful, astute collection, starred by PW, a nurse goes against regulations by becoming attached to a clone that's harvested for body parts; elderly men at an assisted living center begin calling phone sex lines, affecting the lives of the staff." Read more...

Film rights to Mary South's story "The Age of Love", from her collection YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN, have been optioned by Anonymous Content.

[P]rescient and unsettling... You Will Never Be Forgotten reads like it was written for the world we've just entered... South writes as though she has always been where we find ourselves now... You Will Never Be Forgotten's stories are united by South's keen examination of the thrill and risk of human connection... You Will Never Be Forgotten shows us there is still tenderness to be found, and protected, in the brave new world to come.

YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN is one of New York Public Library's "Best Books of 2020" List Lit Hub's "Notable Short Story Collections from 2020" The Atlantic's "The Books Briefing" Newsletter

This is a delicious, absurdly sharp collection of stories - funny, painful, macabre, sometimes gruesome, and humming with intelligence. Mary South is a tremendous talent and this book is a gem.

YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN has been longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection! Read more...

This story takes many brilliant twists and turns and culminates in an ending so surprising and inevitable Flannery O'Connor would surely approve.

YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN is on of Electric Lit's "20 Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020": "The stories in Mary South's collection range from uplifting to morbid, but all contain a sharp sense of humor and provide readers with an off-kilter lens to view the world through. From a camp for internet trolls to a women who moves from online stalking to the real thing, South shows the sometimes dark absurdity that technology brings to our lives." Read more...

These swift and spikey stories dive, unafraid, into grief and violence - and emerge with insights as vivid and powerful as a lightning strike. You Will Never Be Forgotten is an arresting, unpredictable, and hilarious collection, and Mary South is an ingenious new talent.

UK: Picador

Mary's PW "Writers to Watch" feature Read more...

One of the strangest and most exciting collections I've read in recent times. This is what I hope for from speculative fiction: an unease that pulls you through the story with urgency, but also delivers new formations of haunting questions that linger long after the story ends.

"[G]ood, inventively-crafted stories about murky tech... they are peppered with Easter eggs of humanity and connection - think the best Black Mirror episodes.

The New Yorker will publish Mary South's title story, "You Will Never Be Forgotten." The current plan is for it to run in the issue of January 20th, which will appear online and on newsstands on January 13th.

South's stories are both funny and profound, often on the same page, but perhaps her best skill is plumbing the intricacies of loneliness, expertly dissecting what that term means in a technology-driven world. This is an electric jolt from a very talented writer. Read more...

While Mary South's stories feature the cutting-edge technology of our present and near future, what makes this collection so exceptional is the deft hand with which she can peel back the sheen of novelty to get to the core of these characters' triumphs and struggles. With sharp insight and wit, South lays bare the timeless truths of love, loss and loneliness at the heart of these stories.

You Will Never Be Forgotten holds firmly together as an exploration of a modern moment defined by cutting-edge science and technology but nevertheless essentially comprised of human emotion... South delivers these poignant, darkly funny tales with a clinical precision that reveals, rather than obscures, her constant reminder that we are all still, despite everything, alive. In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South offers a series of razor-sharp, deeply emotive stories that will appeal to fans of Karen Russell's and Carmen Maria Machado's short fiction.

Here are ten stories of loneliness and loss, bristling with gallows humor, and wrought of nimble, gleefully exacting sentences. With wide-reaching curiosity and deadpan wit, Mary South writes the absurdity and banality of technology-damaged life.

Mary South couldn't have predicted our current moment, but her stories could not feel timelier... Each of South's self-contained, bleak and tightly wrought chapters centers on themes of isolation, loneliness and how screens aren't just a constant presence in our daily interactions, they're directing them... Her depictions of pregnancy and childbirth bring to mind a Margaret Atwood-esque darkness.

South is reminiscent of George Saunders, replete with strangeness and dark humor. This intriguing collection should put South on readers' radars and is perfect for fans of Black Mirror