Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)
Charles Yu
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0307948463
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.
A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.”
Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction.
Stay away from vagueness. Avoid ambiguity. Be clear. Be clear with your intentions. 5 It’s like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do. 6 You are wondering: how does your desire get projected out into the world? 7 It is a kind of translation device. You translate the contents of your mind into words and then input them into the machine. The machine accepts those words and translates them into effects in the physical world.
end, we were barely talking to one another, just carving up bodies, leaving them in piles. Green flesh hacked up everywhere. Krugnor isn’t any of the classic types. Krugnor is special, and everyone can see it right away. It used to be there were only four kinds of people: fighters, mages, clerics, and thieves. What someone did for a living said something about who they were, what they thought of themselves, how they approached the world: strength, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma. Krugnor, on
records. She just looks out the porthole and doesn’t say anything. We both understand what I have to do. I’ve got to find a way to avoid dying, but if I actually manage to do that, we don’t know what would happen to her. She’s got to get off the ship tonight. We eat dinner in silence. I start to do the dishes but she says why bother. I help her pack a small suitcase. She’s not mad at me anymore, she’s way past that, but the fact that she’s not crying is more than a little surprising. Sort of
are we going to tell the crew?” I say. “Trust me. The crew is not going to care.” Then my wife pantomimes killing the captain, pretending to smash a rock against his head while he makes elaborate and overly detailed dying sounds, both of them smiling at each other the whole time, like a couple of kids pretending to be space explorers. Sunday (and Beyond): In the end, the official report listed the cause of the captain’s demise as “Death by Space-Thingy.” An inquiry was made by Internal
tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the morning: I’m at a funeral. Feeling grief. Someone else’s grief. Like wearing a stranger’s coat, still warm with heat from another body. I’m feeling a mixture of things. Grief, mostly, but also I detect some guilt in there. There usually is. I hear crying. I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces. Nice clothes. Our services aren’t cheap. As the shift manager is always reminding