Something in My Eye

An “intriguing and highly original” debut short story collection—winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (Booklist). Michael Jeffrey Lee’s stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee’s forests are full of menace too—unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship . . . In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to a slang that is the characters’ own. It’s a masterful performance, and Lee’s inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat—hyper-stylized structure and language that offer both clarity and turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what’s most important: a direct address that makes visible those truths we’d rather not see. “Lee’s stories are intriguing and highly original, with a bent toward the weird, both in character and worldview. He is a master of voice, portraying the lives of men who are lost, lonely, and disturbed.” —Booklist “Lee is very successful in creating a dream-like, emotionally disconnected state throughout, with intentionally stilted dialogue and plots that tend to revolve around forms of symbolic gestures, physical violence, or sexual deviance.” —Publishers Weekly