Refresh, Refresh

NPR’S "Selected Shorts" * Plimpton Prize * Pushcart Prize * Best American Short Stories 2006

“Refresh, Refresh is the story of 2006. Full of bravery and bravado, and it fairly crackles with life. These stories mark the beginning of what is bound to be a long and brilliant career for Benjamin Percy. Welcome him.”—Ann Patchett

The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, of men—of fathers—leaving their sons to fight among themselves. But the boys’ bravado fades at home when, alone, they check e-mail again and again for word from their fathers at the front.

Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves—to everyone—that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house whose basement opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.

“Refresh, Refresh is a completely impressive collection of short fiction by one of our most accomplished younger writers. Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction, in this case horror, overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient. These stories contain a brutal power and are radiant with pain—only a writer of surpassing honesty and directness could lead us here.”—Peter Straub

“Benjamin Percy has a fabulous eye for detail, the names of things, weeds, weapons, machines, and renders superbly the revelatory shadings of character. In Refresh, Refresh he is unafraid of story, plot, and writes of plain lives in crisis without blinking, in sinewy, rippling prose, the rhythms of his sentences ever taking us more deeply inside.”—Daniel Woodrell