Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

It should have been apparent from the dust jacket blurb announcing that the author of this story collection, Wells Tower, had been published in McSweeney's and the New Yorker (and that he "divides his time" between Chapel Hill and, of course, Brooklyn) that he would be a certain type of writer, I believe the term is hipster fraud, who would not be worth reading, but I once again made the mistake of wasting my time on a new author while shelves of old, proven great books looked on in silent mockery. Everything Tower writes is false. David Garnett's extraordinary tale of a woman turning into a fox is more believable than even the most mundane occurence in one of these stories. Tower piles on the he-man incidents -- hunting, car mechanics, carpentry -- in an attempt at Hemingway, I suppose, but the result is sad impotence. He is a despicable writer whose book I am tempted to burn rather than resell.