Pretend I'm Not Here features characters struggling with sex, identity and meaning in a world collapsing around them. Everyone is longing for something-the beloved, a newborn child, even annihilation. Cities burn, protests rage, isolation intensifies. A motif of masks and costumes runs throughout as characters experiment with who they are and struggle for connection in an absurd world. Though bleak, many of the stories end with a moment of dark optimism.
These stories start out in familiar territories, realisms invoking people and places around America, until they flatly reveal they are more unfamiliar, weirder, wrong-er, sexier, and sometimes more terrifying and sad, and more speculative, than what it seemed they were going to be doing. But then you've got to realize that they got more real-more accurate. I became interested in that motion each of these stories made, and ever impacted by Sager's decisive vision on the discrete plane of the sentence, where a camera has a "snout" and a pair of white lace underwear wraps around a perverted aristocrat's ankle, in a ritualistic tryst with a robot, "like a manacle."-Caren Beilin, author of Sea, Poison and Revenge of the ScapegoatTrey Sager's stories illuminate people who prefer shadows. His beautifully written, very compelling stories engage the reader in characters whose interior lives are at odds with their place in the world. They doubt and have no idea they have a place in it. Sager's take on friendships and family recognize hurt and alienation, where life is always puzzling. His stories disdain the obvious for the intriguing, subtle, and intelligent. Sometimes perverse and never sentimental, Trey Sager's debut collection welcomes a wonderful, unusual writer.-Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions and Paying AttentionTrey Sager's fiction is the future this reader wants. Tender and brutal, perfect for lovers of David Lynch, Sager's sentences take hold and keep you in their grip.-Kathleen Heil, author of You Can Have It All
