Last Night at the Lobster E-Book

Stewart O'Nan

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'A book that embodies what's best in us.' - Stephen King Washington Post Best Book of the Year,2017 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, 2017 Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year,2017 The Red Lobster chain restaurant perched in the far corner of a run-down American mall hasn't been making its numbers and has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a tricky last shift with a near-mutinous staff and the final onslaught of hungry retirees, lunatics, and office parties. All the while, Manny wondering how to handle the waitress he's still in love with, what to do about his pregnant girlfriend, and how to find the Christmas present that will make everything better. Stewart O'Nan has been called 'the bard of the working class', and Last Night at the Lobster is a American cult classic and a masterpiece of precision and empathy.

Leseprobe

for my brother John andeveryone who works the shifts nobody wants

All the vatos and their abuelitas

All the vatos carrying a lunch pail

All the vatos looking at her photo

All the vatos sure that no one sees them

All the vatos never in a poem

—Luis Alberto Urrea

Darden Restaurants, Inc., raised its outlook and expects full year 2005 diluted net earnings per share growth in the range of 22% to 27%....

—MSN.com

Contents

Hours of Operation

Which Nobody Can Deny

The Most Wonderful Time

Please Wait to be Seated

End of Day

Acknowledgments

Praise for Last Night at the Lobster

Also by Stewart O’Nan

Copyright

HOURS OF OPERATION

Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled. Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly. Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry. It’s the holidays—a garbage truck stopped at the light has a big wreath wired to its grille, complete with a red velvet bow. The turning lane waits for the green arrow above to blink on, and a line of salted cars takes a left into the mall entrance, splitting as they sniff for parking spots.

One goes on alone across the far vastness of the lot, where a bulldozed mound of old snow towers like a dirty iceberg. A white shitbox of a Buick, the kind a grandmother might leave behind, the driver’s-side door missing a strip of molding. The Regal keeps to the designated lane along the edge, stopping at the stop sign, though there’s nothing out here but empty spaces, and off in a distant corner, as if anchoring the lot, the Regal’s destination, a dark stick-framed box with its own segregated parking and unlit sign facing the highway—a Red Lobster.

The Regal signals for no one’s benefit and slips into the lot like an oceanliner finally reaching harbor, glides by the handicapped spots straddling the front walk, braking before it turns and disappears behind the building, only to emerge a few long seconds later on the other side, way down at the very end, pulling in beside a fenced dumpster as if the driver’s trying to hide.