You Are Not the One: Stories

In this debut collection of eight compulsively readable stories, Vestal McIntyre combines honesty and compassion with hilarious dialogue,bringing together the comic milieu of David Sedaris with the spot-on perceptions of Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here. With ONJ.com, a young woman in advertising decides she wants a gay man in her life, almost as if she were shopping for a poodle. Unluckily, the gay man she finds, a good-looking and fast-talking freelancer, isn’t as pleasant and fun as she had hoped. In the loopy Dunford, a lonely, aging architect with a suppressed fascination for female escorts decides impulsively to take the opportunity of his wife’s absence to set up a date. Sadly for Dunford, he realizes too late that his escort doesn’t share his penchant for masturbation in car washes. Quieter notes are sounded in Foray about a bookish teenaged recluse discovering an unexpected emotional connection to his family after his mother asks him to read Moby Dick to his young, mentally retarded cousin. And Nightwalking centres on a woman sleepwalker whose mother’s death frames the occasion for a rocky family reunion. You Are Not the One marks the auspicious arrival of an exciting new talent.