What He's Poised to Do

Mary Margaret O’Hara, Miss America (1988). There are eccentrics in pop music, and then there are Eccentrics: artists who put every last bit of their elusive, misshapen, but still beautiful personality into their work. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s one of the archetypal Eccentrics, and her sole solo album, Miss America, is one of the strangest pop records that also makes perfect sense.

Paul Beatty, Joker Joker Deuce (1994). I read lots of poetry, but I don’t understand it. Or rather: I love watching words play, but not all of them are my kids. Or rather: I like it when I see someone walking around, shining like a high-watt bulb, phrases and fragments spilling out of his pockets. Or rather: Sooner or later, someone was going to fuse the verbal energy of hip-hop with the formal rigor of poetry with the confusion of modern life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments always give me cottonmouth. How can you possibly measure who contributes to a book of short stories? Some people were models for characters, with consent. Others were models for characters, less consensually. Some people provided support. Other people provided competition. Others still sat near me in an airport or a restaurant, just for a minute, but had a look about them that got me thinking. There are hundreds of unknown collaborators and co-conspirators who cannot be named, and of those who can be named, I will expose only a fraction of them. Thanks to Cal Morgan, for editing and publishing me. Thanks to Ira Silverberg and Ruth Curry, for representing me. Thanks to Gail, for marrying and tolerating me. Thanks to Daniel and Jake, for being top-drawer kids. Thanks to Lauren, for being a top-drawer friend. Thanks to my parents, Richard and Bernadine, and to my brothers, Aaron and Josh. And thanks, finally, to the novelists, short story writers, song-writers, and filmmakers whose work I depend upon every day of my life for…well, for life. By making things, they make the world and have helped me come a long way from unaware.

About the Author

BEN GREENMAN is an editor at The New Yorker. His acclaimed works of fiction include Please Step Back, Superbad, Superworse, and A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Opium Magazine, and elsewhere. Greenman lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

ALSO BY BEN GREENMAN

Superbad

Superworse

A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both

Correspondences

Please Step Back

Credits

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover painting by Alyssa Monks, Bed, 2003, Oil on Linen, 80 X 36 inches, Courtesy DFN Gallery, New York.

Copyright

The following stories have appeared, in slightly different form (and in some cases with different titles), in other venues: “What He’s Poised to Do” in The L; “Barn” on Fivechapters.com; “The Hunter and the Hunted” in OneStory; “The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy for Moral and Ethical Practice and the Treatment of Sadness Resulting from the Misapplication of the Above” in McSweeney’s, issue 29; “A Bunch of Blips” in Lumina; “To Kill the Pink” in The Lifted Brow.

In addition, the stories “What He’s Poised to Do,” “The Govindan Ananthanarayanan Academy for Moral and Ethical Practice and the Treatment of Sadness Resulting from the Misapplication of the Above,” “From the Front,” “Country Life Is the Only Life Worth Living; Country Love Is the Only Love Worth Giving,” and “Hope” appeared in slightly different form in Correspondences, a limited-edition boxed set of stories published in 2008 by Hotel St. George Press.

WHAT HE’S POISED TO DO. Copyright © 2010 by Ben Greenman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200298-3

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