Wide Eyed (Little House on the Bowery) - A Charming Children's Book for Bedtime Reading & Family Storytime

Part of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series, this collection of stories is told by a woman compelled to divulge her secrets, fantasies, and obsessions.“With linked anecdotes substituting for plot, Dalton’s 20 quick, vibrant, wild tales read more like fantastical diary entries than short stories . . . The latest in Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series, the work is ripe with sensuality and playfulness . . . Dalton’s unique blend of dream and bracingly honest observation makes this a delightfully weird and disarming read.” ―Publishers WeeklyIn Trinie Dalton’s tweaked vision of reality, psychic communications between herself and Mick Jagger, The Flaming Lips, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, and Pavement are daily occurrences. Animals also populate this book: beavers, hamsters, salamanders, black widows, owls, llamas, bats, and many more are characters who befriend the narrator. This collection of stories is told by a woman compelled to divulge her secrets, fantasies, and obsessions with native Californian animals, glam rock icons, and horror movies, among other things. With a setting rooted in urban Los Angeles but colored by mythic tales of beauty borrowed from medieval times, Shakespeare, and Grimm’s fairy tales, Wide Eyed makes the difficulties of surviving in a contemporary American city more palatable by showing the reader that magic and escape is always possible.Stories include “Hummingbird Moonshine,” in which the narrator’s frustrated hunt for authentic religion in botanicas and science books culminates in a spiritual connection made with a hummingbird. In “Oceanic,” she resolves to marry a manatee after a drunken pre-party for her best friend’s wedding. In “Tiles,” four vignettes about bloody accidents in tiled bathrooms intermingle with scenes from Dalton’s favorite scary movies.Featuring oddball prose in the traditions of Dalton’s literary heroes―Denton Welch, Robert Walser, and Jane Bowles―these stories have a dreamy, imaginative quality that reveal a peculiar state of mental ecstasy. To be inside the mind of Trinie Dalton is to be escorted into bliss.