The Oranging of America and Other Stories

Description

Max Apple’s first collection turns American consumer culture, celebrity, work, and family life into deadpan comic fables. In the title story, a fictionalized Howard Johnson crosses the country spreading orange-roofed restaurants and a standardized vision of comfort. Elsewhere, a romance takes shape around an obsession with vegetables, while a family measures its history through gas stations. Apple’s narrators meet national ambition at human scale: through courtship, Jewish family memory, commercial aspiration, and the effort to remain distinct inside a culture built for replication. The stories combine plainspoken surfaces with surreal premises, using affectionate absurdity to ask how Americans make identities from products, institutions, and inherited dreams.

Themes