Lynda Schor
Lynda Schor is the author of the short fiction collections Appetites and True Love & Real Romance. Her stories, one of which was nominated for an O. Henry Award, have appeared in many literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. She has won many grants and prizes, including two Maryland State Arts Council grants. She is the fiction editor for the online literary magazine Salt River Review. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School University.
The Body Parts Shop: Stories
Interview (2005)
Lynda Schor, deservedly widely published, has been honing her original and satirical voice, her writerly craft, for years, and its shows: She’s an immensely gifted, completely eccentric writer, unafraid of risks, whether in form or context. She’s funny, sexy, quirky, adventurous, and brave. Lynda’s work scares some readers, and delights others. I’m among those who are delighted.
The Body Parts Shop: Stories
Lynda Schor
2005
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-120-1
The Body Parts Shop is a collection of intriguingly perverse, provocative tales that encompass both the beautiful and grotesque nature of human interaction. The stories combine as a wayward declaration to the physical form, while independently delving into the secret and sordid recesses of our darker subconscious.
Like J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, The Body Parts Shop offers a vision that is at once oddly poetic and clandestinely morbid. In “The History of My Breasts” Schor weaves an enchantingly bizarre tale of outrageous and unapologetic infatuation, all centered on the perfect, huge bosom of one woman. “The Scalp Agency” chronicles the efforts of a bald stockbroker to buy himself a new head of hair.
Schor has concocted a satirical revelation of the new America, where every message is an advertisement and everything is for sale — our beliefs, our thoughts, our private moments, and even our body parts.
Lynda Schor’s stories are as dazzling as her readers have come to expect.
… her stories were a thinking woman’s exploration of sex, the body, and relationships. Her provocative new collection shows that her work continues to be relevant as she skewers our culture’s preoccupation with self-help manuals and pokes fun at our (and her) obsessions.
Lynda Schor’s most recent collection of short stories, The Body Parts Shop, is filled with dazzling observations and witty prose.… when Schor shines, she shines brightly.
Lynda Schor’s The Body Parts Shop is that deliciously creepy storefront off the main drag, the one whose wares are so personal they’re frightening, yet so universal as to be mundane. She is brazenly graceful … and aborbing her words makes a reader feel both a little brasher and a little more introspective.
Schor’s touch is light and her humor finely adjusted. The stories are meditations on sensuality. Most of Schor’s men and women (and in one story, chimpanzees) are lost and seeking — without much hope of finding it — the comfort in and for their bodies that they sense to be their heritage. They are homesick for a lost paradise that is overgrown by a sophisticated and hollow society whose only gratifications are material … These stories are calculated assaults on much that we hold dear. This gives them enhanced value. Malice as an artistic tool cannot be ignored, but it can — as in this collection of freewheeling stories — be enjoyed. Highly recommended.
Lynda Schor is the type of writer who knows how to dig through the detritus of American culture and find gold.… The Body Parts Shop forms a portrait of an America on the brink of sanity, all sketched in perfect detail by one of the country’s finest writers on the fringes.