Greg's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 06 Mar 2019 04:17:37 -0800 60 Greg's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Mr. Bridge (Mrs and Mr Bridge, #2)]]> 129936 367 Evan S. Connell 0865470545 Greg 3 3.98 1969 Mr. Bridge (Mrs and Mr Bridge, #2)
author: Evan S. Connell
name: Greg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2009/12/01
date added: 2019/03/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Gilead (Gilead, #1) 68210 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.]]> 247 Marilynne Robinson 031242440X Greg 5 Anna Karenina’s dictum on the nature of happiness—that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we’ll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan “unhappy family� at the expense of the happy ones. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo.

In this context, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes not just as a breath of fresh air, but as a ray of light, quietly penetrating to the heart of mysteries regarding joy and love, life and death. Because it’s written as a series of missives from the aged narrator to his young son, meant not to be read until long after the narrator’s death, Gilead is largely plotless—a conflict of sorts between the narrator and a friend’s child does eventually develop, but it is a quiet conflict, and one that doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through the novel. The narrative is never as important as the meditations that surround it.

This is a novel that celebrates life, that variegated communion between inner and outer worlds, between ego and experience. But Robinson is also concerned with death, not only as the inevitable end of that communion but also as its thematic counterpoint. If Robinson’s territory here is the spiritual life of one man in particular, her thematic concern is how we in general can face the ends of our lives without despair or resort to existential reframings of the problem—how we can face the prospect of death, in fact, with quiet gratitude and even joy. Robinson’s portrayal of religion is especially deft; instead of opiate or panacea, her narrator’s Christianity serves as a lens, providing a stasis and a vocabulary through which the novel can wrestle with its concerns.

Ultimately, the quiet conclusions that Gilead seems to favor—that the experience of existence is one that we should treasure as a gift, that we too often lose sight of the immense beauty of the world amidst our quotidian bustle, that love and charity have the power to remake lives—are neither religious nor secular. Rather, they are humanist; they all concern a belief in the fundamental dignity of human lives. Is it melodramatic to say that these are the kind of quiet encouragements that we could usefully carry in our minds into the shadows of our own personal Gethsemanes? Regardless, Gilead offers us, in its portrait of a long life reflected upon with some degree of contentment, a reminder of just how deep, enthralling, and abidingly strange happiness can be.

Perhaps the problem is not that happiness is not idiosyncratic enough to be worth investigating. The problem may be instead that happiness is simply too big for most writers to write convincingly about, that perhaps joy, like God, is too capacious to fully describe. Yet here is the rare novel that suggests insights into the natures of both.]]> 3.84 2004 Gilead (Gilead, #1)
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2014/01/11
shelves:
review:
It often feels as if the contemporary literary scene has internalized Anna Karenina’s dictum on the nature of happiness—that it is not idiosyncratic, with the implication that it is not worth the kind of careful attention that literature applies to its subjects. We need look no further than our own lives to recognize the problem we’ll encounter if we preoccupy ourselves with the Tolstoyan “unhappy family� at the expense of the happy ones. Asked about our defining or most enlightening moments, most of us are as likely to recount happy memories as we are moments of despair. Yet too often, contemporary literature ignores this. Authors able to give the lie to Tolstoy by rendering joy as a complex substance are few and far between: think Ron Carlson, Laurie Colwin, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Russo.

In this context, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes not just as a breath of fresh air, but as a ray of light, quietly penetrating to the heart of mysteries regarding joy and love, life and death. Because it’s written as a series of missives from the aged narrator to his young son, meant not to be read until long after the narrator’s death, Gilead is largely plotless—a conflict of sorts between the narrator and a friend’s child does eventually develop, but it is a quiet conflict, and one that doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through the novel. The narrative is never as important as the meditations that surround it.

This is a novel that celebrates life, that variegated communion between inner and outer worlds, between ego and experience. But Robinson is also concerned with death, not only as the inevitable end of that communion but also as its thematic counterpoint. If Robinson’s territory here is the spiritual life of one man in particular, her thematic concern is how we in general can face the ends of our lives without despair or resort to existential reframings of the problem—how we can face the prospect of death, in fact, with quiet gratitude and even joy. Robinson’s portrayal of religion is especially deft; instead of opiate or panacea, her narrator’s Christianity serves as a lens, providing a stasis and a vocabulary through which the novel can wrestle with its concerns.

Ultimately, the quiet conclusions that Gilead seems to favor—that the experience of existence is one that we should treasure as a gift, that we too often lose sight of the immense beauty of the world amidst our quotidian bustle, that love and charity have the power to remake lives—are neither religious nor secular. Rather, they are humanist; they all concern a belief in the fundamental dignity of human lives. Is it melodramatic to say that these are the kind of quiet encouragements that we could usefully carry in our minds into the shadows of our own personal Gethsemanes? Regardless, Gilead offers us, in its portrait of a long life reflected upon with some degree of contentment, a reminder of just how deep, enthralling, and abidingly strange happiness can be.

Perhaps the problem is not that happiness is not idiosyncratic enough to be worth investigating. The problem may be instead that happiness is simply too big for most writers to write convincingly about, that perhaps joy, like God, is too capacious to fully describe. Yet here is the rare novel that suggests insights into the natures of both.
]]> Pastoralia 415230 The New Yorker as one of the "20 Best American Fiction Writers Under 40," a hilarious, inventive, unforgettable collection of stories.

His remarkable first collection of stories was hailed by The New York Times as "the debut of an exciting new voice in fiction." Garrison Keillor called him wildly funny, pure, generous--all that a great humorist should be." With this new collection, George Saunders takes us even further into the shocking, uproarious and oddly familiar landscape of his imagination.

The stories in Pastoralia are set in a slightly skewed version of America, where elements of contemporary life have been merged, twisted, and amplified, casting their absurdity-and our humanity-in a startling new light. Whether he writes a gothic morality tale in which a male exotic dancer is haunted by his maiden aunt from beyond the grave, or about a self-help guru who tells his followers his mission is to discover who's been "crapping in your oatmeal," Saunders's stories are both indelibly strange and vividly real.

George Saunders has been identified as a writer in the tradition of Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut--"a savage satirist with a sentimental streak," said The New York Times. In this new collection, Saunders brings greater wisdom and maturity to the worldview he established with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, leaving no doubt about his place as the brilliant successor to these writers.


Pastoralia --
Winky --
Sea oak --
The end of FIRPO in the world --
The barber's unhappiness --
The falls]]> 188 George Saunders 1573221619 Greg 4 3.99 2000 Pastoralia
author: George Saunders
name: Greg
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/16
shelves:
review:

]]> CivilWarLand in Bad Decline 331688
Bizarre but familiar, fierce but always humane, these are stunningly original stories by a master of the form.

Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 1573225797 (ISBN13: 9781573225793)

An alternate cover edition exists here.]]> 179 George Saunders Greg 4 4.12 1996 CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
author: George Saunders
name: Greg
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories]]> 281112
With her uncanny insights into human character and the bittersweet complications of love, Ellen Gilchrist occupies a unique place in American fiction.]]> 563 Ellen Gilchrist 0316193658 Greg 4 4.28 2009 Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories
author: Ellen Gilchrist
name: Greg
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories]]> 761807
Rather than add to the massive canon of the victimized, for example, "My Slave" takes the perspective of the victimizer. In "The Open Curtain," a man achieves intimacy with his family only when he recognizes -- watching them dine as he sits in his car at the curb -- that he lives in a household of strangers. Menaced by a gang of skinheads in a Jewish cemetery, an American tourist in Germany placates the Neo-Nazis with a formula he continues to repeat even after he is safely back home in "I Am Not a Jew." And as for love, it makes demands in such stories as "Do Me" that shake our very notions of what it means to love.

If these stories engage the world in sometimes shocking ways, they are virtuoso engagements, eloquent in their prose, surprising in their plotting, sly in their humor. Biguenet shifts among voices and narrative strategies and imposes neither a single style nor a repeated structure as he depicts the ecological catastrophe of "A Plague of Toads," the problem posed by a ghost in the nursery in "Fatherhood," and the ghastly discovery a grieving widower defends as "another kind of memory" in "Rose."

Such mastery of craft may come as a surprise in a first-time author, but even more impressive is the object of his art. For whether it seeks to prick or to tickle, each story in The Torturer's Apprentice addresses its subject with an authority unusual in contemporary literature as it entices the reader beyond the boundaries of the expected and the accepted.]]> 177 John Biguenet 0060007451 Greg 2 3.87 2001 The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories
author: John Biguenet
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2012/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Clockers 45794
Veteran homicide detective Rocco Klein's passion for the job gave way long ago. His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together, until the day Victor Dunham � a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record � confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn't take long for Rocco's attention to turn to Victor's brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime.

At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, Clockers is a stunningly well-rendered chronicle of modern life on the streets.]]> 608 Richard Price 0747562733 Greg 4 4.09 1992 Clockers
author: Richard Price
name: Greg
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2010/03/01
date added: 2010/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Await Your Reply 6251222
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
(jacket)]]> 324 Dan Chaon 0345476026 Greg 3 3.54 2009 Await Your Reply
author: Dan Chaon
name: Greg
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2010/02/01
date added: 2010/03/05
shelves:
review:
Some mixed feelings, but I devoured it in three sittings. Still can't wait for Chaon's next story collection.
]]> Drinking with the Cook 606721 Book by Furman, Laura 256 Laura Furman 0970152523 Greg 3 3.31 2001 Drinking with the Cook
author: Laura Furman
name: Greg
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> White Noise 11762 310 Don DeLillo 0140283307 Greg 2
These characters are not people, they are merely convenient delivery methods for the ingestion of Delillo’s hyperactive rhetoric � they are as human and as worthy of our care and concern, in other words, as a syringe or a spansule. Ultimately, their flatness, their plain silliness, undermines the novel itself. How can we credit Delillo’s depiction of a society hypnotized by consumerism � the relentless encouragement to consume goods, to consume information � when the novel seems to suggest that such a society people are reduced to behaving like the characters he depicts? The characters he depicts are so patently ridiculous, so obviously lifeless and fake, that it’s unclear why any reader should believe that the society depicted in the novel, the society that has produced these fakes, is anything but a fake itself, a Potemkin village of Delillo’s own design. The novel offers no reason to believe that its society has any more relation to our own than its ridiculous characters have to the real people we encounter in our lives.

Death exists. Modern commercial culture offers vapid distractions from that fact. But hamstrung as it is by a vapidity of its own, White Noise can offer little more insight into the situation than that.]]> 3.86 1985 White Noise
author: Don DeLillo
name: Greg
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2009/12/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:
Credit goes to Delillo for his spot-on, feverish rendering of thanatophobia (“In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe�), and for his depiction of the “Airborne Toxic Event� � which, with its bleak grandeur punctuated by vivid and minute details, reminded me of the evacuation of Dunkirk in MacEwan’s Atonement. Delillo’s characters are at their most believable and compelling when they are alone, or alternatively when they fade into the background of a panorama. But put them together and get them talking, or place them in a quotidian situation where there’s no dynamic backdrop against which they can fade away, and it’s quickly apparent that they are no more convincing as human beings than the animatronic robots in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.

These characters are not people, they are merely convenient delivery methods for the ingestion of Delillo’s hyperactive rhetoric � they are as human and as worthy of our care and concern, in other words, as a syringe or a spansule. Ultimately, their flatness, their plain silliness, undermines the novel itself. How can we credit Delillo’s depiction of a society hypnotized by consumerism � the relentless encouragement to consume goods, to consume information � when the novel seems to suggest that such a society people are reduced to behaving like the characters he depicts? The characters he depicts are so patently ridiculous, so obviously lifeless and fake, that it’s unclear why any reader should believe that the society depicted in the novel, the society that has produced these fakes, is anything but a fake itself, a Potemkin village of Delillo’s own design. The novel offers no reason to believe that its society has any more relation to our own than its ridiculous characters have to the real people we encounter in our lives.

Death exists. Modern commercial culture offers vapid distractions from that fact. But hamstrung as it is by a vapidity of its own, White Noise can offer little more insight into the situation than that.
]]> The Corrections 3805 After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man - or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, "The Corrections" brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalised greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.]]> 653 Jonathan Franzen 1841156736 Greg 2 The Corrections is content to spend (for example) nine pages describing, in exhaustive and occasionally lurid detail, a senile man's hallucinated encounter with, yes, a sentient turd, and then less than a single paragraph recounting, in broad summary, his wife’s surprisingly tender reaction to this episode of dementia. For those first four hundred and fifty pages, the novel is long on brio and intelligence but short on heart.

In its closing sections, the novel’s own fading emotional reticence and growing sensitivity try to pass themselves off as actual character growth, but this is a cheap trick. It’s not the characters who grow or change so much as the novel’s willingness to faithfully track their emotional valances in scene and not summary, and in plain language rather than in flights of metaphorical fantasy. In the above example, Enid feels that remarkable tenderness after her husband’s episode, but the novel’s prose barely gives it credit, dispensing with it in less than a paragraph. Much later, when the novel finally chooses to linger upon and explore that kind of emotional territory, the reader ought to remember that the characters have been feeling these sorts of things all along � it’s the book itself that’s finally opened up, not the Lambert family.

This is terribly frustrating, because some of the writing in the book’s final hundred pages is excellent. A shame that it’s robbed of much of its power by the plain and simple cowardice of the several hundred pages that have come before. The Corrections is often entertaining, but flimsy.]]> 3.83 2001 The Corrections
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Greg
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2009/11/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:
Franzen writes with wit and energy to spare, but for about four hundred and fifty pages, The Corrections is content to spend (for example) nine pages describing, in exhaustive and occasionally lurid detail, a senile man's hallucinated encounter with, yes, a sentient turd, and then less than a single paragraph recounting, in broad summary, his wife’s surprisingly tender reaction to this episode of dementia. For those first four hundred and fifty pages, the novel is long on brio and intelligence but short on heart.

In its closing sections, the novel’s own fading emotional reticence and growing sensitivity try to pass themselves off as actual character growth, but this is a cheap trick. It’s not the characters who grow or change so much as the novel’s willingness to faithfully track their emotional valances in scene and not summary, and in plain language rather than in flights of metaphorical fantasy. In the above example, Enid feels that remarkable tenderness after her husband’s episode, but the novel’s prose barely gives it credit, dispensing with it in less than a paragraph. Much later, when the novel finally chooses to linger upon and explore that kind of emotional territory, the reader ought to remember that the characters have been feeling these sorts of things all along � it’s the book itself that’s finally opened up, not the Lambert family.

This is terribly frustrating, because some of the writing in the book’s final hundred pages is excellent. A shame that it’s robbed of much of its power by the plain and simple cowardice of the several hundred pages that have come before. The Corrections is often entertaining, but flimsy.
]]> <![CDATA[The Emperor's Tomb (Von Trotta Family, #2)]]> 57787 128 Joseph Roth 1585673277 Greg 4 3.93 1938 The Emperor's Tomb (Von Trotta Family, #2)
author: Joseph Roth
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1938
rating: 4
read at: 2009/12/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Radetzky March (Von Trotta Family, #1)]]> 54258 The Radetzky March charts the history of the Trotta family through three generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through the Battle of Solferino, to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's intelligent compassionate narrative illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.]]> 363 Joseph Roth 1862076057 Greg 4 4.10 1932 The Radetzky March (Von Trotta Family, #1)
author: Joseph Roth
name: Greg
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at: 2009/11/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Sweet Hereafter 26924 416 Russell Banks 0099268809 Greg 4 3.90 1991 The Sweet Hereafter
author: Russell Banks
name: Greg
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2009/10/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Dispatches 4339 Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.

From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.

Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.]]> 260 Michael Herr 0679735259 Greg 5 4.22 1977 Dispatches
author: Michael Herr
name: Greg
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2009/10/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories]]> 11751 All Aunt Hagar's Children. Here he turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them in the city, people who in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally complex. With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw behind them and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.]]> 399 Edward P. Jones 0060557567 Greg 4 3.81 2006 All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories
author: Edward P. Jones
name: Greg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2009/11/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Triple Time (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)]]> 6530949
The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.

Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.]]> 153 Anne Sanow 0822943808 Greg 0 3.90 2009 Triple Time (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)
author: Anne Sanow
name: Greg
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Sweet Talk 432082 194 Stephanie Vaughn 0517091135 Greg 3 4.24 1990 Sweet Talk
author: Stephanie Vaughn
name: Greg
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/01
date added: 2010/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form]]> 96015 377 Madison Smartt Bell 0393320219 Greg 4 3.89 1997 Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form
author: Madison Smartt Bell
name: Greg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2007/11/01
date added: 2009/12/17
shelves:
review:
Bell gives a great crash-course in close-reading---not always so much for structure as for consistency in theme and imagery. But the book feels a little hampered by story selection. Bell looks at a number of stories by students of his, written in workshops he was running, and, despite his many assertions to the contrary, these stories are almost universally mediocre. I wish Bell devoted a greater portion of his efforts to the work of veteran writers---the best analyses offered here are of stories by Mary Gaitskill, Peter Taylor, etc.
]]> The Pacific and Other Stories 87984
The Pacific and Other StoriesĚý isĚýa collection of sixteen stories that display the remarkable scope, incomparable wit, and deft prose that have come to be Mark Helprin's signature. A British paratrooper jumps into occupied territory; the 1958 New York Yankees gain an unexpected teammate in a puny, teenaged Hasidic Jew; a September 11th widow receives an astonishing gift from the contractor working on her new apartment—these and other stories exhibit the constantly changing variety of the ocean itself, the peaks and troughs of life. Lighthearted, glittering fables are met with starker tales that sound the depths of sacrifice and duty. The Pacific and Other Stories is a resplendent, powerful collection of lasting substance and emotional import.]]> 384 Mark Helprin 0143035762 Greg 2 The Pacific feel intellectually and even morally lazy. They are deliberately un-complex, presenting points without counterpoints.

In other words, many of these stories�"Monday" is a prime example—read simply as illustrations, examples-in-action, of Helprin's predetermined intellectual and moral stances: Here is how hard work pays off in the end, or, Here is how virtue is its own reward. This is laziness, an authorial unconcern with deeper digging or self-examination, and it does not make for compelling or particularly useful fiction. Great stories create dialogue; great stories suggest enormous complexity; these stories are more akin to fables, as easily digestible and as easily dismissed.]]> 4.10 2004 The Pacific and Other Stories
author: Mark Helprin
name: Greg
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2004
rating: 2
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Helprin's prose is clean and lucid, if occasionally too lavish for its ends, and I appreciate the dry, wry sense of humor in these stories. But all too often, the stories in The Pacific feel intellectually and even morally lazy. They are deliberately un-complex, presenting points without counterpoints.

In other words, many of these stories�"Monday" is a prime example—read simply as illustrations, examples-in-action, of Helprin's predetermined intellectual and moral stances: Here is how hard work pays off in the end, or, Here is how virtue is its own reward. This is laziness, an authorial unconcern with deeper digging or self-examination, and it does not make for compelling or particularly useful fiction. Great stories create dialogue; great stories suggest enormous complexity; these stories are more akin to fables, as easily digestible and as easily dismissed.
]]> In the Gloaming 504841
When the austere and moving title story of this collection appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, it inspired two memorable film adaptations, and John Updike selected it for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In these ten stories, Alice Elliott Dark visits the fictional town of Wynnemoor and its residents, present and past, with skill, compassion, and wit.]]> 286 Alice Elliott Dark 0684870053 Greg 2 Best American Short Stories of the Century, so I was disappointed to find this collection so uneven.]]> 3.97 2000 In the Gloaming
author: Alice Elliott Dark
name: Greg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Too much melodrama. Too many Shyamalan-esque "plot twists." Too much "she chided," "he inquired," "she hissed." Updike selected the title story for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century, so I was disappointed to find this collection so uneven.
]]> A Long and Happy Life 32897 A Long and Happy Life, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."

From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of Kate Vaiden, his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didn't also mention in glowing terms the reviewer's fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the clothbound edition of this truly enduring work as a companion volume to his brilliant book of essays, A Common Room, published simultaneously.

]]> 208 Reynolds Price 068911947X Greg 2 3.88 1962 A Long and Happy Life
author: Reynolds Price
name: Greg
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1962
rating: 2
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Price writes this, his first novel, as if he's trying to channel William Faulkner, but his long, convoluted sentences lack the fiery, dreamlike clarity of Faulkner's. The big-hearted compassion that makes Price's later work so noteworthy is evident here, but the prose still reads as if it is coming from an author who hasn't yet found his own voice. As is the case.
]]> Taking Care 297906
With unforgettable characters, places, and events—a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet—Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.]]> 256 Joy Williams 0394729129 Greg 4 4.30 1982 Taking Care
author: Joy Williams
name: Greg
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Had to revise this one upward after re-reading the title story the other day. Wow. One of the finest short stories I've read in awhile.
]]> Close Range: Wyoming Stories 27999 The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent.

The half-skinned steer --
The mud below --
55 miles to the gas pump --
The bunchgrass edge of the world --
A lonely coast --
Job history --
Pair a spurs --
People in Hell just want a drink of water --
The governors of Wyoming --
The blood bay --
Brokeback Mountain]]> 289 Annie Proulx 0684852225 Greg 2 Rock Springs captures the West as it is; this collection, for all the beauty of its prose, lacks the spark of life.]]> 4.01 1999 Close Range: Wyoming Stories
author: Annie Proulx
name: Greg
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at: 2006/11/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
A case of style over substance. Proulx writes striking and occasionally beautiful sentences and her powers of description are very fine indeed, but her characters are aliens impersonating (poorly, at times) human beings. With names like � I wish I were kidding � Budgel Wolfscale, Proulx's pseudo-humans seem caught up in a cultic masculinity that Proulx renders with the relish of a fetishist. Richard Ford's Rock Springs captures the West as it is; this collection, for all the beauty of its prose, lacks the spark of life.
]]> <![CDATA[Rumble, Young Man, Rumble: Stories]]> 831871
Rumble, Young Man, Rumble opens in a sporting goods store, owned and operated by the members of an amateur paintball team. Logan Bryant, its self-professed star--as politically incorrect as he is knowledgeable about athletic equipment and barbecue grills--guides us through this world of barbells, guns and protein supplements. And by the end of “Balls, Balls, Balls,� we see that it is his insecurity and doubt, not his brawn and confidence, that have shaped him into the sort of man he is.

“Real emotion makes people nervous.Ěý.Ěý.Ěý. Passion is too Mussolini.â€�

"The Art of the Possible� puts us into the mind of an up-and-coming congressman making a bid for a second term. As we follow him from one photo op to another, we see firsthand what he must sacrifice of himself to please the many--from sleep to kindness to integrity. And in a final, heart-wrenching scene, the snapshots line up to reveal a particular truth--that these sacrifices are not borne by him alone.

“All you need to learn is that you can hit him and he can hit you and that it might hurt but you’re not going to kill each other.� “Except sometimes,� she said. I nodded again. “Except sometimes.�

In “The Ropes,� Alexander Folsom spends a summer with his father on Martha’s Vineyard, getting his strength back after his last boxing match, in which he fared the worse. Trying to work, trying to play, trying to flirt with the soon-to-be-married daughter of a well-to-do family on the Vineyard, Alex finds himself floundering in most every way as he attempts to reconcile the ends of both his athletic and his college careers—and to find a new, more personal form of discipline.

Throughout his debut collection of nine powerful stories, Benjamin Cavell shows us the darker side of being a “real� man. Along with the machismo, the self-assuredness and power comes a heightened sense of fear and mortality, and ultimately a deeper search for comfort, for someone or something to rely upon. Funny and smart, urgent, fearless and emotionally rich, these are stories without an ounce of fat on them. Though his literary forebears may be Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, Benjamin Cavell speaks in a voice entirely his own.]]> 208 Benjamin Cavell 0375414649 Greg 1 3.32 2003 Rumble, Young Man, Rumble: Stories
author: Benjamin Cavell
name: Greg
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at: 2005/01/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
Full of easy, shock-jock masculinity, which Cavell doesn't examine in any real depth. Occasionally he suggests that these macho alpha-males are secretly sensitive, or secretly insecure, or have secret father-issues, but none of this is new or particularly interesting. Sometimes the stories even seem to be using their content in a calculated, cold-blooded manner, a "shock and it will sell" mentality common also to talk radio and cookie-cutter Hollywood torture flicks. Occasionally fun, but never enlightening and too often oppressive.
]]> The Glister 5941264 Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school vanishes after venturing into the poisoned woods. Without conclusive evidence of foul play, the authorities consider the boys to be runaways.
The town policeman suspects otherwise but, paralyzed with fear, he does nothing. And so it is up to the children who remain to take action. Their plan to stop the forces of evil that are destroying their town is at the shocking and terrifying heart of]]> 228 John Burnside 0385527640 Greg 4 3.13 2008 The Glister
author: John Burnside
name: Greg
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/06/01
date added: 2009/09/06
shelves:
review:
My review is online at .
]]> <![CDATA[The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel]]> 46958
Following the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.

In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.

This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.]]> 336 James Wood 0312424604 Greg 4 4.11 2004 The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
author: James Wood
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2009/08/20
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Place on the Water: An Angler's Reflections on Home]]> 1509872 240 Jerry Dennis 0312141270 Greg 3 4.11 1993 A Place on the Water: An Angler's Reflections on Home
author: Jerry Dennis
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality]]> 80199 Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live.

Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."]]> 273 Thomas Lynch 0393321649 Greg 4 4.07 2000 Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality
author: Thomas Lynch
name: Greg
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Dance of the Happy Shades 322662
Contents

- Walker Brothers Cowboy
- The Shining Houses
- Images
- Thanks for the Ride
- The Office
- An Ounce of Cure
- The Time of Death
- Day of the Butterfly
- Boys and Girls
- Postcard
- Red Dress -1946
- Sunday Afternoon
- A Trip to the Coast
- The Peace of Utrecht
- Dance of the Happy Shades]]> 240 Alice Munro Greg 3 4.12 1968 Dance of the Happy Shades
author: Alice Munro
name: Greg
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1968
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You]]> 14283
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE®ĚýIN LITERATURE 2013]]> 246 Alice Munro 0375707484 Greg 3 4.14 1974 Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
author: Alice Munro
name: Greg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Refresh, Refresh 1334278

Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves—to everyone—that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.]]> 249 Benjamin Percy 1555974856 Greg 2 3.93 2005 Refresh, Refresh
author: Benjamin Percy
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2005
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Unaccustomed Earth 85301
In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,� a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,� a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,� a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.]]> 352 Jhumpa Lahiri 0676979343 Greg 4 4.14 2008 Unaccustomed Earth
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Greg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)]]> 1736739
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life � sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.]]> 270 Elizabeth Strout Greg 3 3.85 2008 Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Greg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Boat 2599523
In the magnificent opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,� a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father’s experiences in Vietnam—and what seems at first a satire of turning one’s life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. “Cartagena� provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In “Meeting Elise,� an aging New York painter mourns his body’s decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman’s bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.

Brilliant, daring, and demonstrating a jaw-dropping versatility of voice and point of view, The Boat is an extraordinary work of fiction that takes us to the heart of what it means to be human, and announces a writer of astonishing gifts.]]> 272 Nam Le 030726808X Greg 3 3.64 2008 The Boat
author: Nam Le
name: Greg
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Nothing Right 5179145
A collection of stories from one of the New Yorker’s “twenty young fiction writers of the new millennium,� a series of unforgettable glimpses into contemporary family life.

Set in the American Southwest, and featuring one previously unpublished story, Nothing Right shows one of our best writers working at the top of her game. Antonya Nelson’s stories are masterpieces: poignant, hilarious, truthful explorations of domesticity.

The artfully rendered characters in Nothing Right try to keep themselves intact as their personal lives explode around them. A mother and her teenage son finally find common ground when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. A woman leaves her husband and finds herself living with a stranger who is getting extensive plastic surgery while her best friend is dying of cancer. In “Or Else,� one of three short stories nominated for a National Magazine Award for the New Yorker, a man brings his girlfriend to a house he claims belongs to his family, only to have his lie exposed when one of the real owners comes home to scatter her father’s ashes.

These stories are sure to delight longtime fans and readers lucky enough to be just discovering Antonya Nelson.
]]> 304 Antonya Nelson 1596915749 Greg 3 3.85 2009 Nothing Right
author: Antonya Nelson
name: Greg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property]]> 56472
“The best book I know of for talented but unacknowledged creators. . . . A masterpiece.� —Margaret Atwood

“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.� —David Foster Wallace

By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared.

An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.]]> 352 Lewis Hyde 0394715195 Greg 5 4.05 1979 The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
author: Lewis Hyde
name: Greg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The End 2302476 The End by Salvatore Scibona follows an elderly abortionist, an enigmatic drapery seamstress, a teenage boy, a jeweler―dramatically into the heart of a crime that will twist all their lives. Against a background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, we at last return to August 15, 1953, and see everything Rocco saw―and vastly more―through the eyes of various characters in the crowds.
The End is the unforgettable debut of a singular new American novelist.]]> 320 Salvatore Scibona 1555974988 Greg 4 3.39 2008 The End
author: Salvatore Scibona
name: Greg
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God]]> 6378825 From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring, inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry—a dazzling chronicle of a personal and national identity reclaimed.

Erik Reece’s grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Erik’s father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not coincidentally, Jesus� age when he was crucified� Erik’s father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.

So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson’s famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an “American gospel� coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and intellectual peace with his own American soul.

The result of Reece’s journey is a deeply personal but also deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political, and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call on to combat them.]]> 240 Erik Reece 1594488592 Greg 4 3.81 2009 An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God
author: Erik Reece
name: Greg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination]]> 3291844
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't--but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.]]> 186 Elizabeth McCracken 0316027677 Greg 5 4.17 2008 An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
author: Elizabeth McCracken
name: Greg
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
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review:

]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Greg 5 3.53 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale
author: Herman Melville
name: Greg
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Absent Friends (New Directions Paperbook)]]> 2279427 Busch, Frederick 278 Frederick Busch 0811211754 Greg 4 3.90 1989 Absent Friends (New Directions Paperbook)
author: Frederick Busch
name: Greg
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/02/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Legend of a Suicide 5086417 160 David Vann 1558496726 Greg 4 3.81 2008 Legend of a Suicide
author: David Vann
name: Greg
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/01/01
date added: 2009/02/23
shelves:
review:
My review is online at the .
]]> <![CDATA[A River Runs Through It and Other Stories]]> 30043 "A River Runs Through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.]]> 217 Norman Maclean 0226500667 Greg 5 4.18 1976 A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
author: Norman Maclean
name: Greg
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> In Constant Flight 827321 159 Elizabeth Tallent 0805001093 Greg 2 3.92 In Constant Flight
author: Elizabeth Tallent
name: Greg
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2009/02/01
date added: 2009/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Rock Bottom 4436786
But something happened on the way to glory, and now, two years later, along with their coke-fueled, mohawked female manager, they have washed up in Amsterdam for the final show of their doomed and dismal European tour. The singer has become a born-again Buddhist who preaches from the stage, the bass player's raging eczema has turned his hands into a pulpy mess, the drummer is a sex-fiend tormented by the misdeeds of his porn-king father, and the guitar player -- the only talented one -- is thoroughly cowed by the constant abuse of his bandmates.

As they stumble through their final day together, the Blood Orphans find themselves on a comic tour of frustration, danger, excitement, and just possibly, redemption.]]> 373 Michael Shilling 0316031925 Greg 5 Behind the Music series has made an industry out of telling and retelling this story � adding, for the sake of narrative, a Part Three (call it Aftermath, or Redemption) and bending over backwards to force every band into their up-down-up, N-shaped rubric. The effect, of course, is facile, the glossy television product of elided facts and carefully edited interview snippets.

Rock Bottom, Michael Shilling’s debut novel, bears a paradoxical relationship to this old rock and roll story. In recounting the very bad last day of the Blood Orphans � a very bad band that could, once upon a time, have been very good � Rock Bottom is at once a raucous celebration of rock mythos and magic and a searing portrayal of what it might actually be like to be caught at the center of a VH1-worthy storm. What makes this novel noteworthy is Shilling’s ability to reconcile these objectives. Rock Bottom embraces the myths of rock even as it explodes them.

This feat is the product of an apparently egoless author. Like a good impresario once the band has taken the stage, Shilling makes himself invisible: the narration of the novel is given entirely over to its central characters, the four band members and their female manager. Jumping, in successive chapters, from one troubled head to the next, Shilling writes in an extremely close third-person that occasionally verges on stream-of-consciousness. The effect is remarkable: constructed completely from the actions, memories, and language of the characters themselves (none of that intrusive Behind the Music narrational presence), a complete picture of the Blood Orphans� dissolution emerges. The language may be salty, but one of the pleasures of this novel is the way in which it speaks through its characters. To deny them their F-bombs would be to deny them a certain degree of reality on the page. Shilling, to his credit, never flinches.

It would be unfair to call these characters “unlikeable� and leave it at that � more often than not, these characters don’t like themselves. Each is responsible, in his or her own way, for the failure of a band that began with such promise; the power of the novel lies in its relentless plot, which forces each bandmember and their manager to face that fact. Think of that line from Nixon: “Mistakes were made.� With the passive voice, he camouflages his culpability. Scene by scene, Shilling strips the camouflage of passive denial from his characters until at last they see themselves � and we, as readers, likewise see them � clearly.

Because of this, though it brims with brio and black comedy, Rock Bottom is also a novel haunted by the specter of what could have been; a keenly rendered awareness of loss inflects many of its best passages. (Consider the deeply tragicomic moment, early in the novel, when Bobby the bassist stumbles upon a Blood Orphans display in a record store.) The path these characters follow is mythic, but by their humanity � Shilling has imagined each so intricately, in all his or her particularities � they rejuvenate it. Shilling’s is an exciting new voice: few debut novels manage to feel so muscular, ballsy, and heartfelt.

At a key moment in the novel (I won’t reveal where, or in what context), a blue arc of electricity appears. Its purpose, I think, is to remind us: the Rock Gods are present here. Rock Bottom is a myth expertly repackaged. Through the humanity of its characters, it transcends its subject, finding art where VH1 finds only sensationalism. Rock Bottom takes an age-old rock and roll story and retells it in a funny, fresh, and surprisingly moving fashion.]]> 3.33 2008 Rock Bottom
author: Michael Shilling
name: Greg
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2009/01/01
date added: 2009/01/28
shelves:
review:
In rock and roll mythology, there are two linked stories that seem to be told over and over again: Pride, and The Fall. We admire a band’s success, marvel at its excess � and then, like motorists passing a grisly accident, we rubberneck at its self-immolation. VH1’s Behind the Music series has made an industry out of telling and retelling this story � adding, for the sake of narrative, a Part Three (call it Aftermath, or Redemption) and bending over backwards to force every band into their up-down-up, N-shaped rubric. The effect, of course, is facile, the glossy television product of elided facts and carefully edited interview snippets.

Rock Bottom, Michael Shilling’s debut novel, bears a paradoxical relationship to this old rock and roll story. In recounting the very bad last day of the Blood Orphans � a very bad band that could, once upon a time, have been very good � Rock Bottom is at once a raucous celebration of rock mythos and magic and a searing portrayal of what it might actually be like to be caught at the center of a VH1-worthy storm. What makes this novel noteworthy is Shilling’s ability to reconcile these objectives. Rock Bottom embraces the myths of rock even as it explodes them.

This feat is the product of an apparently egoless author. Like a good impresario once the band has taken the stage, Shilling makes himself invisible: the narration of the novel is given entirely over to its central characters, the four band members and their female manager. Jumping, in successive chapters, from one troubled head to the next, Shilling writes in an extremely close third-person that occasionally verges on stream-of-consciousness. The effect is remarkable: constructed completely from the actions, memories, and language of the characters themselves (none of that intrusive Behind the Music narrational presence), a complete picture of the Blood Orphans� dissolution emerges. The language may be salty, but one of the pleasures of this novel is the way in which it speaks through its characters. To deny them their F-bombs would be to deny them a certain degree of reality on the page. Shilling, to his credit, never flinches.

It would be unfair to call these characters “unlikeable� and leave it at that � more often than not, these characters don’t like themselves. Each is responsible, in his or her own way, for the failure of a band that began with such promise; the power of the novel lies in its relentless plot, which forces each bandmember and their manager to face that fact. Think of that line from Nixon: “Mistakes were made.� With the passive voice, he camouflages his culpability. Scene by scene, Shilling strips the camouflage of passive denial from his characters until at last they see themselves � and we, as readers, likewise see them � clearly.

Because of this, though it brims with brio and black comedy, Rock Bottom is also a novel haunted by the specter of what could have been; a keenly rendered awareness of loss inflects many of its best passages. (Consider the deeply tragicomic moment, early in the novel, when Bobby the bassist stumbles upon a Blood Orphans display in a record store.) The path these characters follow is mythic, but by their humanity � Shilling has imagined each so intricately, in all his or her particularities � they rejuvenate it. Shilling’s is an exciting new voice: few debut novels manage to feel so muscular, ballsy, and heartfelt.

At a key moment in the novel (I won’t reveal where, or in what context), a blue arc of electricity appears. Its purpose, I think, is to remind us: the Rock Gods are present here. Rock Bottom is a myth expertly repackaged. Through the humanity of its characters, it transcends its subject, finding art where VH1 finds only sensationalism. Rock Bottom takes an age-old rock and roll story and retells it in a funny, fresh, and surprisingly moving fashion.
]]> Miles from Nowhere 2895061 289 Nami Mun 1594488541 Greg 5 first-reads
“I was trapped in my body, and my body was trapped in this empty lot with men who knew nothing about love or pity but everything else crucial,� our young narrator, Joon, tells us early in this debut novel by Nami Mun. Like so much of Joon’s narration, it is a statement made with the chill accuracy of retrospect. And, given the context in which the line appears, its implications are terrifying.

Miles from Nowhere, which tells the story of Joon’s teenage years spent living on the streets of New York City, is a book that knows everything about love and pity, including how to withhold both. It contains images of startling brutality � a dog, fed chicken bones, dead in the gutter with “a little dish of blood under his mouth�; a “small pregnant girl� with a bruised cheek sitting in the “rusted� light of a dirty bathroom � and depicts despair with crystalline intensity. The reader may flinch; the prose never does.

Given this, it is a measure of Mun’s artistry that Miles from Nowhere is not overwhelmed by the darkness it contains. The book’s power lies in all that it does know about love and pity, and the ways in which that knowledge shines through. Setting plays a part in this: in Mun’s hands, even the dirtiest and most mundane corners of New York are capable of flaring with sudden radiance. In one extraordinary passage, which cannot be adequately explained in summary, the brightly lit windows of a ninety-nine-cent store, its aisles lined with multicolored detergent bottles “like an open box of crayons,� offer momentary, almost mystical comfort to Joon at the end of a harrowing night. (I should add, though, that in this book such moments rarely come with the clichéd flashbulb burst of an epiphany; rather, they arrive like the sunrise: by the time you actually notice the light, the shadows have already been shifting for some time, as if in preparation. Mun is an exacting, word-perfect author in this regard � the moment cited above is a full forty pages in the making.)

If Nami Mun’s New York is a place of darkness shot through with unexpected glimmers of light, then her narrator, Joon, is the perfect tour guide. Joon comes to understand early on that “[i]n order to get what I needed � shelter, food, money, friendship � parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed.� And yet of all the things that Joon does sacrifice � her health, safety, sobriety, dignity, and perhaps even at times her sanity � she never loses her essential capacity (to keep returning to my talking points) for love and pity. Like one of Balzac’s flaneurs, Joon is a camera, constantly observing others, interweaving her own story with theirs if only for the temporary comfort of togetherness that this provides.

Reviewers who have called this book “depressing� are missing the point. Miles from Nowhere pits Joon’s need for love and pity, and her ability to bestow the same upon others, against the howling vacuum of the city. In this light, Joon’s resilience is miraculous � and all the more so because the reader believes in it, roots for it all the way. (Rarely has such a simple line as “I was that person� left me so exhilarated.)

As a novel, Miles from Nowhere is episodic; reading it, I find myself reminded, in a way, of a picaresque: the journey is as important as the destination. There is no conventional, overarching plot “problem� save the unceasing daily pressure to survive. As an avid reader of short fiction, though, I should mention that a number of the chapters here were originally published in literary journals as short stories; one of them, “Shelter,� received a 2007 Pushcart Prize. The book coheres as a novel � thanks in large part to the pitch-perfect consistency of Joon’s voice and the intensity of the reader’s feelings toward her � but Mun is a skilled engineer of the short-story form, and the reader who also studies these chapters as short stories will be richly rewarded. Note, for example, the intricately interwoven timelines in “On the Bus,� or compare the ending of Mun’s “King’s Manor� with that of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking� (one a drug-induced fever dream paradoxically promising connection, the other promising just the opposite). The very finest chapters/stories here � “Avon,� “King’s Manor,� and “What We Had,� by my reckoning, though there's not a weak entry in the bunch � are intricate engines of tragedy, and in their formal perfection they bestow upon Joon and her supporting cast a stark, cool beauty. This beauty is the truest solace that literary art can offer its subjects and its readers. Those familiar with Robert Stone’s best short stories � “Helping� and “Miserere,� for example � will recognize the effect.

That this is Mun’s authorial debut is astonishing; it feels like the work of an author in mid-career, completely assured of her powers. Like Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere does not simply “herald the arrival of a significant new talent� (that old reviewer’s trope, endlessly trotted out to describe promising first books). Rather, it stands as evidence of an enormously skilled, confident, and compassionate author who somehow has come to us already fully formed.]]> 3.59 2008 Miles from Nowhere
author: Nami Mun
name: Greg
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2008/12/01
date added: 2009/01/08
shelves: first-reads
review:
[I received an ARC of this book through Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ' First-reads program.]

“I was trapped in my body, and my body was trapped in this empty lot with men who knew nothing about love or pity but everything else crucial,� our young narrator, Joon, tells us early in this debut novel by Nami Mun. Like so much of Joon’s narration, it is a statement made with the chill accuracy of retrospect. And, given the context in which the line appears, its implications are terrifying.

Miles from Nowhere, which tells the story of Joon’s teenage years spent living on the streets of New York City, is a book that knows everything about love and pity, including how to withhold both. It contains images of startling brutality � a dog, fed chicken bones, dead in the gutter with “a little dish of blood under his mouth�; a “small pregnant girl� with a bruised cheek sitting in the “rusted� light of a dirty bathroom � and depicts despair with crystalline intensity. The reader may flinch; the prose never does.

Given this, it is a measure of Mun’s artistry that Miles from Nowhere is not overwhelmed by the darkness it contains. The book’s power lies in all that it does know about love and pity, and the ways in which that knowledge shines through. Setting plays a part in this: in Mun’s hands, even the dirtiest and most mundane corners of New York are capable of flaring with sudden radiance. In one extraordinary passage, which cannot be adequately explained in summary, the brightly lit windows of a ninety-nine-cent store, its aisles lined with multicolored detergent bottles “like an open box of crayons,� offer momentary, almost mystical comfort to Joon at the end of a harrowing night. (I should add, though, that in this book such moments rarely come with the clichéd flashbulb burst of an epiphany; rather, they arrive like the sunrise: by the time you actually notice the light, the shadows have already been shifting for some time, as if in preparation. Mun is an exacting, word-perfect author in this regard � the moment cited above is a full forty pages in the making.)

If Nami Mun’s New York is a place of darkness shot through with unexpected glimmers of light, then her narrator, Joon, is the perfect tour guide. Joon comes to understand early on that “[i]n order to get what I needed � shelter, food, money, friendship � parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed.� And yet of all the things that Joon does sacrifice � her health, safety, sobriety, dignity, and perhaps even at times her sanity � she never loses her essential capacity (to keep returning to my talking points) for love and pity. Like one of Balzac’s flaneurs, Joon is a camera, constantly observing others, interweaving her own story with theirs if only for the temporary comfort of togetherness that this provides.

Reviewers who have called this book “depressing� are missing the point. Miles from Nowhere pits Joon’s need for love and pity, and her ability to bestow the same upon others, against the howling vacuum of the city. In this light, Joon’s resilience is miraculous � and all the more so because the reader believes in it, roots for it all the way. (Rarely has such a simple line as “I was that person� left me so exhilarated.)

As a novel, Miles from Nowhere is episodic; reading it, I find myself reminded, in a way, of a picaresque: the journey is as important as the destination. There is no conventional, overarching plot “problem� save the unceasing daily pressure to survive. As an avid reader of short fiction, though, I should mention that a number of the chapters here were originally published in literary journals as short stories; one of them, “Shelter,� received a 2007 Pushcart Prize. The book coheres as a novel � thanks in large part to the pitch-perfect consistency of Joon’s voice and the intensity of the reader’s feelings toward her � but Mun is a skilled engineer of the short-story form, and the reader who also studies these chapters as short stories will be richly rewarded. Note, for example, the intricately interwoven timelines in “On the Bus,� or compare the ending of Mun’s “King’s Manor� with that of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking� (one a drug-induced fever dream paradoxically promising connection, the other promising just the opposite). The very finest chapters/stories here � “Avon,� “King’s Manor,� and “What We Had,� by my reckoning, though there's not a weak entry in the bunch � are intricate engines of tragedy, and in their formal perfection they bestow upon Joon and her supporting cast a stark, cool beauty. This beauty is the truest solace that literary art can offer its subjects and its readers. Those familiar with Robert Stone’s best short stories � “Helping� and “Miserere,� for example � will recognize the effect.

That this is Mun’s authorial debut is astonishing; it feels like the work of an author in mid-career, completely assured of her powers. Like Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere does not simply “herald the arrival of a significant new talent� (that old reviewer’s trope, endlessly trotted out to describe promising first books). Rather, it stands as evidence of an enormously skilled, confident, and compassionate author who somehow has come to us already fully formed.
]]> How Fiction Works 1355465 Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic? Why do some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh?

James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.]]> 265 James Wood 0374173400 Greg 4 How Fiction Works at the .]]> 4.00 2008 How Fiction Works
author: James Wood
name: Greg
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/12/16
shelves:
review:
I'm taking part in an ongoing group discussion-review of How Fiction Works at the .
]]> A Map of Home 3195325
Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates the story of her childhood in Kuwait, her teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), and her family’s last flight to Texas. Nidali mixes humor with a sharp, loving portrait of an eccentric middle-class family, and this perspective keeps her buoyant through the hardships she encounters: the humiliation of going through a checkpoint on a visit to her father’s home in the West Bank; the fights with her father, who wants her to become a famous professor and stay away from boys; the end of her childhood as Iraq invades Kuwait on her thirteenth birthday; and the scare she gives her family when she runs away from home.

Funny, charming, and heartbreaking, A Map of Home is the kind of book Tristram Shandy or Huck Finn would have narrated had they been born Egyptian-Palestinian and female in the 1970s.]]> 304 Randa Jarrar 1590512723 Greg 0 currently-reading 3.77 2008 A Map of Home
author: Randa Jarrar
name: Greg
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/11/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Evening Is the Whole Day 2154433 340 Preeta Samarasan 061887447X Greg 5 3.65 2008 Evening Is the Whole Day
author: Preeta Samarasan
name: Greg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2008/11/09
date added: 2008/11/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Mystery Stories 2002]]> 101015 In his introduction to this year's collection, James Ellroy explores the differences between the novel and the short story. Included here are experts at both forms. Featuring renowned novelists like Stuart Kaminsky, Michael Connelly, Joe Gores, and Robert B. Parker, as well as veterans of this series like Brendan DuBois, Michael Downs, Joyce Carol Oates, and Clark Howard, this edition will delight readers with its wide variety and peerless quality.]]> 405 James Ellroy 0618124934 Greg 3 3.51 2002 The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
author: James Ellroy
name: Greg
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/10/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best American Mystery Stories 2003]]> 276917 Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
This seventh installment of the premier mystery anthology boasts pulse-quickening stories from all reaches of the genre, selected by the world-renowned mystery writer Michael Connelly. His choices include a Prohibition-era tale of a scorned lover's revenge, a Sherlock Holmesinspired mystery solved by an actor playing the famous detective onstage, stories of a woman's near-fatal search for self-discovery, a bar owner's gutsy attempt to outwit the mob, and a showdown between double-crossing detectives, and a tale of murder by psychology. This year's edition features mystery favorites as well as talented up-and-comers, for a diverse colleciton sure to thrill all readers.

James Crumley Pete Dexter Brendan DuBois Elmore Leonard Walter Mosley Joyce Carol Oates]]> 352 Michael Connelly 061832965X Greg 3
The star of both these anthologies may be Scott Wolven, who seized my attention with two fine, minimal stories of rural impermanence. His 2005 collection, Controlled Burn, is now on my to-read list.]]> 3.64 2003 The Best American Mystery Stories 2003
author: Michael Connelly
name: Greg
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/10/25
shelves:
review:
Doing a bit of genre-related research, I recently revisited BAMS 2002 and 2003. As might be expected, both anthologies are mixed bags. The best of these crime/mystery stories offer a refreshing contrast to the stories of, say, Annie Proulx or Donald Ray Pollack � they portray toughness and despair without fetishistic fascination. The worst of these stories flatten into predictable exercises in genre, their characters flattened for the sake of plot, form, structure.

The star of both these anthologies may be Scott Wolven, who seized my attention with two fine, minimal stories of rural impermanence. His 2005 collection, Controlled Burn, is now on my to-read list.
]]> Prejudice and Literature 3581920 Book by Morse, J. Mitchell 193 J. Mitchell Morse 0877220727 Greg 0 currently-reading 4.00 1976 Prejudice and Literature
author: J. Mitchell Morse
name: Greg
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/10/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Irrelevant English Teacher]]> 4237554 Book by Morse, J.Mitchell 152 J. Mitchell Morse 0877220328 Greg 5 4.50 1974 The Irrelevant English Teacher
author: J. Mitchell Morse
name: Greg
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2008/09/01
date added: 2008/10/13
shelves:
review:
my review is available at the
]]> Atonement 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Greg 4 3.94 2001 Atonement
author: Ian McEwan
name: Greg
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2008/10/11
date added: 2008/10/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Greg 5 3.82 1980 Housekeeping
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Greg
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/09/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts]]> 934267 322 Will Storr 0061132195 Greg 4 3.96 2006 Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts
author: Will Storr
name: Greg
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/09/19
shelves:
review:
Often funny, occasionally poignant, and in spots even a little chilling. Storr is perhaps too thrilled with his own pseudoscience in certain passages, but at the same time it's refreshing to read about the paranormal from an author whose skepticism is reasoned, not fanatical.
]]> The Hill Bachelors 599553
His first collection since the bestselling After Rain , William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors is a heartbreaking book about men and women and their missed four people live in a suburban house, frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a part in a movie will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the chaos of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's compassion for the human condition and confirm once again his position as one of the premier writers of the short story.]]> 256 William Trevor 0141002174 Greg 4 4.04 2000 The Hill Bachelors
author: William Trevor
name: Greg
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2008/08/31
date added: 2008/08/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study]]> 98704
In this comprehensive study of Carver, Nesset discusses the relationship of minimalism and postmodern trends and the rise of new realism. By locating Carver in the gallery of American letters, Nesset shows him to be at once more simple and more complex than we might have believed, skillfully laying the groundwork for Carver studies to come.]]> 131 Kirk Nesset 0821411004 Greg 0 currently-reading 3.88 1995 Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study
author: Kirk Nesset
name: Greg
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/08/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Tyrants: Stories 1203327 Brilliantly evocative stories about tyrannies-political and intimate, historical and domestic-and about the unpredictable delinquencies of lust.

The grouped stories in Tyrants trace the many forms of emotional inheritance-cultural, romantic, and historical. Some deftly portray both time and place, while others mine interpersonal relations with such intimacy and truth that they could be set anytime, anywhere. In the first sequence of stories, a son inherits and reconsiders his father's convoluted and extravagant notions about love, sex, wealth, and fatherhood. In the second, an American man and his Korean wife confront the cultural implications of a romantic, self-imposed exile. And in the historical fictions that complete the collection, love and flight, ambition, exploration, and exile intertwine in a helium balloon above Sweden, in an Italian airship at the North Pole, and in Stalin's dacha during the Nazi invasion. Marshall N. Klimasewiski's talent for "deft psychological triangulations" (New York Times Book Review) and for capturing "the subtle dynamics between people" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) is on full display here.]]> 218 Marshall N. Klimasewiski 0393330966 Greg 4 3.88 2008 Tyrants: Stories
author: Marshall N. Klimasewiski
name: Greg
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/20
date added: 2008/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Tell Me a Riddle 424959 116 Tillie Olsen 0385290101 Greg 3 4.03 1961 Tell Me a Riddle
author: Tillie Olsen
name: Greg
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1961
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Hill Road 375323 240 Patrick O'Keeffe 0670033987 Greg 4 3.85 2005 The Hill Road
author: Patrick O'Keeffe
name: Greg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[12 Short Stories and Their Making]]> 275791 356 Paul Mandelbaum 089255312X Greg 3 3.85 2005 12 Short Stories and Their Making
author: Paul Mandelbaum
name: Greg
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2008/03/22
date added: 2008/03/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The View from Castle Rock 9815
In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.

Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place� in the fancy resort world she’s come to, is transformed by her employer’s perceptive parting gift. A father whose early expectations of success at fox farming have been dashed finds strange comfort in a routine night job at an iron foundry. A clever girl escapes to college and marriage.

Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected—these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.]]> 349 Alice Munro 1400042828 Greg 0 currently-reading 3.70 2006 The View from Castle Rock
author: Alice Munro
name: Greg
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Love of a Good Woman 863508 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780375703638, alternative cover can be found here

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013

In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.

Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself.

Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.]]> 395 Alice Munro Greg 5 4.11 1998 The Love of a Good Woman
author: Alice Munro
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/03/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Desperate Characters 526593
First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature.]]> 156 Paula Fox 039331894X Greg 4 3.72 1970 Desperate Characters
author: Paula Fox
name: Greg
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2008/02/07
shelves:
review:

]]> At the Jim Bridger 433947 208 Ron Carlson 0312307241 Greg 4 4.19 2000 At the Jim Bridger
author: Ron Carlson
name: Greg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/02/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers]]> 32533 Ěý
John Gardner was almost as famous as a teacher of creative writing as he was for his own works. In this practical, instructive handbook, based on the courses and seminars that he gave, he explains, simply and cogently, the principles and techniques of good writing. Gardner’s lessons, exemplified with detailed excerpts from classic works of literature, sweep across a complete range of topics—from the nature of aesthetics to the shape of a refined sentence. Written with passion, precision, and a deep respect for the art of writing, Gardner’s book serves by turns as a critic, mentor, and friend. Anyone who has ever thought of taking the step from reader to writer should begin here.]]> 240 John Gardner 0679734031 Greg 4 3.99 1984 The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
author: John Gardner
name: Greg
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2008/01/01
date added: 2008/01/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Here We Are in Paradise: Stories]]> 88261 208 Tony Earley 0316199494 Greg 3 3.87 1994 Here We Are in Paradise: Stories
author: Tony Earley
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2008/02/07
date added: 2007/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Transparency: Stories 680841
In Garden City , a weary Chinese couple, struggling to evict their deadbeat tenant, is forced to face the aftermath of their teenage son's death from cancer. And in The Old Gentleman , a daughter becomes alienated from her father when he finds love -- or what he thinks could be love -- in his old age. Frances Hwang is a powerful talent, and Transparency not only showcases her myriad gifts, but also announces the arrival of an exciting new voice.]]> 240 Frances Hwang 0316166936 Greg 4 3.35 2007 Transparency: Stories
author: Frances Hwang
name: Greg
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/27
date added: 2007/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> If the Sky Falls 139066 If the Sky Falls is the debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams.
Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family's violent history (Note to Future Self); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy to a strip club (The Usual Human Disabilities); a man has a breakdown years after witnessing a brutal murder and doing nothing to help the victim (The Other Man). In The November Fifteen, a man is taken from his home and tortured, though he has no idea why; when he returns home he finds a different kind of torture awaiting him.
Two of the stories -- Shift and the Pushcart Prize--winning The Worst Degree of Unforgivable -- are stylistic tours de force. But style in this collection is always at the service of story. Montemarano's fiction maintains that rare balance between traditional storytelling and experimentation: his work is innovative without being flashy, sincere without being sentimental. In an age of hype, If the Sky Falls truly is the real thing -- an original and important achievement in the short-story form.]]> 224 Nicholas Montemarano 0807131229 Greg 3 4.28 2005 If the Sky Falls
author: Nicholas Montemarano
name: Greg
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/19
date added: 2007/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Drown 531989 Drown, Diaz has harnessed the rhythms of anger and release, frustration and joy, to indelible effect.]]> 208 Junot DĂ­az 1573226068 Greg 4 4.02 1995 Drown
author: Junot DĂ­az
name: Greg
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2007/12/09
date added: 2007/12/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Forgetfulness 1793271 258 Ward Just 0618918493 Greg 3 3.34 2006 Forgetfulness
author: Ward Just
name: Greg
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/06
date added: 2007/11/21
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stories of Mary Gordon 3115 Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. Gordon captures the sharp scent of feelings as they shift, the shape of particular lives in their hope and incomprehensibility.

In The Neighborhood, a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. City Life explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. Intertextuality proposes a dream meeting between Proust's characters and the author's aging grandmother. Throughout, Gordon's surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: What were they all, any of them, feeling?one narrator ventures. This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.

With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon's clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.]]> 480 Mary Gordon 0375423168 Greg 3 3.91 2006 The Stories of Mary Gordon
author: Mary Gordon
name: Greg
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2007/10/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Lost in the City 1294124 268 Edward P. Jones 0060566280 Greg 3
Perhaps this perception of misshapen-ness on my part comes from the careful emotional restraint with which Jones delivers these stories. At his best, Jones can be Chekhovian, writing with a balanced, almost judicial empathy for each and every character in a piece, a kind of cool broad-heartedness that lends its own pathos to the story. Too often, though, Jones seems unwilling to dip into the wells of emotion that his stories have, in fact, earned access to. The result can be a story like "Marie," which to me feels technically masterful in its structure and plotting, but which is so evenly restrained throughout that in retrospect it feels flat. The plot exists schematically, but the prose flattens the emotional arc too much for my taste.]]> 3.84 1992 Lost in the City
author: Edward P. Jones
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/10/01
shelves:
review:
A surprisingly uneven collection, with stunning stories like "A New Man," "The Store," and "Gospel" counterpoised against others that feel oddly jumbled, somehow malformed.

Perhaps this perception of misshapen-ness on my part comes from the careful emotional restraint with which Jones delivers these stories. At his best, Jones can be Chekhovian, writing with a balanced, almost judicial empathy for each and every character in a piece, a kind of cool broad-heartedness that lends its own pathos to the story. Too often, though, Jones seems unwilling to dip into the wells of emotion that his stories have, in fact, earned access to. The result can be a story like "Marie," which to me feels technically masterful in its structure and plotting, but which is so evenly restrained throughout that in retrospect it feels flat. The plot exists schematically, but the prose flattens the emotional arc too much for my taste.
]]> North: A Novel 203606 320 Frederick Busch 0345486838 Greg 3 3.65 2005 North: A Novel
author: Frederick Busch
name: Greg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/09/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Jesus Out to Sea 218729 240 James Lee Burke 1416548564 Greg 3 3.93 2007 Jesus Out to Sea
author: James Lee Burke
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/09/17
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stories of Paul Bowles 12046 688 Paul Bowles 0061137049 Greg 4
In his introduction to this edition of the collected stories, Robert Stone writes of a certain "'something missing'" that many readers of Bowles claim to feel, and to balk at. We "trade sympathy for the absence of ordinariness," Stone writes. It's more than that, though. If there is a single universe or sensibility uniting these stories, it's one in which the Other is utterly corrosive to the Self. It's not that Bowles has left empathy out of these stories, it's that he constructs stories in which empathy is impossible. There is a coldness here, a repetitive cruelty, that made these stories difficult for me to read at times.

So perhaps my giving these stories four stars instead of five is more a reflection of my own tastes and beliefs than it is of the icy power of Bowles's art. I'd argue, though, that for all the "absence of ordinariness" Bowles gives us in setting, character, and plot, in theme he strikes the same few notes over and over � strikes them beautifully, masterfully, no doubt, but I felt a certain monotony nonetheless.]]> 4.30 2001 The Stories of Paul Bowles
author: Paul Bowles
name: Greg
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/09/11
shelves:
review:
I can't think of anyone who writes more strikingly than Bowles of The Self (often, but not always, a cultured Westerner) coming face-to-face with The Other. Other-ness, in Bowles's stories, functions like Nietzsche's void: When it is stared into by a protagonist, prodded or investigated or even ostensibly subjugated, it is always staring right back � waiting to infiltrate the protagonist, to explode him or her from the inside.

In his introduction to this edition of the collected stories, Robert Stone writes of a certain "'something missing'" that many readers of Bowles claim to feel, and to balk at. We "trade sympathy for the absence of ordinariness," Stone writes. It's more than that, though. If there is a single universe or sensibility uniting these stories, it's one in which the Other is utterly corrosive to the Self. It's not that Bowles has left empathy out of these stories, it's that he constructs stories in which empathy is impossible. There is a coldness here, a repetitive cruelty, that made these stories difficult for me to read at times.

So perhaps my giving these stories four stars instead of five is more a reflection of my own tastes and beliefs than it is of the icy power of Bowles's art. I'd argue, though, that for all the "absence of ordinariness" Bowles gives us in setting, character, and plot, in theme he strikes the same few notes over and over � strikes them beautifully, masterfully, no doubt, but I felt a certain monotony nonetheless.
]]> Babies Without Tails 1693803 Walter Duranty 1417985208 Greg 3 New York Times, living and writing in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, and this collection of his short stories offers a sometimes-fascinating liberal Westerner's perspective on the pre-Cold War Soviet Union, a country that most of Duranty's contemporary readers would have known next to nothing about. For one reading from this side of MAD and the missile gap, Duranty's obvious empathy for the rural Russian peasant and his critical interest in the penetration of Soviet ideals into the Russian countryside are striking and refreshing.

These pieces read more as fables, really, than as short stories, as their titles ("The Brave Soldier and the Wicked Sorceror," "The Thrifty Peasant and the Precious Mattress," "The Wife Who Lost Her Patience") should suggest. The political clout of the local village Soviet stands in for the magic and deus ex machinas of older tales. In the best of these pieces, Duranty offers up portraits of a rural Russia where old superstitions and new revolutionary ideals are coming into conflict. The socialist ideals own political power, but the old beliefs are too deeply rooted to completely suppress.

This can become too repetitive, though, as in story after story the new instruments of Soviet justice hack through the problems of peasants like a blade through Gordian's knot, their machinations efficient but often inhumane. Fascinating to read at first, but the sheen is quickly dulled by overexposure. Also, Duranty's attempts at magical realism often end up feeling merely silly (see "The Magic Egg").

This is a worthwhile read, though, if you can get your hands on it. I found my copy deep in the stacks of the John K. King bookstore in Detroit, and the cover illustration alone � hastily sketched caricatures of Russian peasants who look like they'd be at home in a Hieronymous Bosch grotesquerie � was easily worth the five dollars I paid.
]]> 4.25 Babies Without Tails
author: Walter Duranty
name: Greg
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2007/09/01
date added: 2007/09/11
shelves:
review:
Walter Duranty worked as a foreign correspondant for the New York Times, living and writing in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, and this collection of his short stories offers a sometimes-fascinating liberal Westerner's perspective on the pre-Cold War Soviet Union, a country that most of Duranty's contemporary readers would have known next to nothing about. For one reading from this side of MAD and the missile gap, Duranty's obvious empathy for the rural Russian peasant and his critical interest in the penetration of Soviet ideals into the Russian countryside are striking and refreshing.

These pieces read more as fables, really, than as short stories, as their titles ("The Brave Soldier and the Wicked Sorceror," "The Thrifty Peasant and the Precious Mattress," "The Wife Who Lost Her Patience") should suggest. The political clout of the local village Soviet stands in for the magic and deus ex machinas of older tales. In the best of these pieces, Duranty offers up portraits of a rural Russia where old superstitions and new revolutionary ideals are coming into conflict. The socialist ideals own political power, but the old beliefs are too deeply rooted to completely suppress.

This can become too repetitive, though, as in story after story the new instruments of Soviet justice hack through the problems of peasants like a blade through Gordian's knot, their machinations efficient but often inhumane. Fascinating to read at first, but the sheen is quickly dulled by overexposure. Also, Duranty's attempts at magical realism often end up feeling merely silly (see "The Magic Egg").

This is a worthwhile read, though, if you can get your hands on it. I found my copy deep in the stacks of the John K. King bookstore in Detroit, and the cover illustration alone � hastily sketched caricatures of Russian peasants who look like they'd be at home in a Hieronymous Bosch grotesquerie � was easily worth the five dollars I paid.

]]> The Sea 3656 The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy� of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.� What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer]]> 195 John Banville 1400097029 Greg 4 3.54 2005 The Sea
author: John Banville
name: Greg
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2007/08/17
date added: 2007/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories]]> 329266 Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught -- to both disastrous and hilarious effect -- in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. In "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera," an ornithologist being held hostage in the Colombian rain forest finds that he respects his captors for their commitment to a cause, until he realizes that the Revolution looks a lot like big business. In "The Good Ones Are Already Taken," the wife of a Special Forces officer battles a Haitian voodoo goddess with whom her husband is carrying on a not-entirely-spiritual relationship. And in "The Lion's Mouth," a disillusioned aid worker makes a Faustian bargain to become a diamond smuggler for the greater good. With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara is a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition.]]> 229 Ben Fountain 0060885602 Greg 3 3.94 2006 Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories
author: Ben Fountain
name: Greg
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2007/08/01
date added: 2007/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Girls: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)]]> 203605
In the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both.

Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen-year-old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of children who vanish every year in America, Jack turns all his attention to this little girl. For finding what has become of this child could be Jack's salvation--if he can just get to her in time. . . .]]> 279 Frederick Busch 0449912639 Greg 5 Girls comes alive in a way that few novels' characters do.

Like Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, Girls is concerned with the prevalence of cruelty and injustice in the world, but in Busch's novel the focus is not political or historical, but rather more intensely centered on an individual life. "I am not a bad man," Jack, our narrator, insists near the end of the novel � and I'm reminded, reading it, how rare and wonderful it can sometimes be simply to be able to stake that claim.
]]> 3.47 1997 Girls: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
author: Frederick Busch
name: Greg
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/26
shelves:
review:
An almost unrelentingly grim novel � but beautiful as well, as Busch creates characters of stunning complexity and reality. The entire cast of Girls comes alive in a way that few novels' characters do.

Like Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, Girls is concerned with the prevalence of cruelty and injustice in the world, but in Busch's novel the focus is not political or historical, but rather more intensely centered on an individual life. "I am not a bad man," Jack, our narrator, insists near the end of the novel � and I'm reminded, reading it, how rare and wonderful it can sometimes be simply to be able to stake that claim.

]]> <![CDATA[For the Relief of Unbearable Urges]]> 29788
Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new talent.

In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute.

The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.]]> 205 Nathan Englander 0375704434 Greg 3 3.95 For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
author: Nathan Englander
name: Greg
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2007/08/11
date added: 2007/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams (A Graywolf Discovery)]]> 124169 236 Thomas Williams 1555971911 Greg 3 3.66 1992 Leah, New Hampshire: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams (A Graywolf Discovery)
author: Thomas Williams
name: Greg
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/26
shelves:
review:
More than worth it for "Goose Pond" alone.
]]> A Flag for Sunrise 832930 448 Robert Stone 0679737626 Greg 5 3.74 1981 A Flag for Sunrise
author: Robert Stone
name: Greg
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sportswriter (Frank Bascombe, #1)]]> 40722 375 Richard Ford 0394743253 Greg 2 3.71 1986 The Sportswriter (Frank Bascombe, #1)
author: Richard Ford
name: Greg
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1986
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination]]> 14391 212 Robert Coles 0395528151 Greg 4 3.84 1989 The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
author: Robert Coles
name: Greg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2007/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea]]> 162332 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679750154

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.]]> 181 Yukio Mishima Greg 4
Romanticism versus cynicism, hope versus nihilism, modernization versus tradition, and the erosion of the bushido code in postwar, Westernized Japan. A small, furious novel.]]> 3.87 1963 The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/04
shelves:
review:
"A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom � that was how he liked to imagine his heart."

Romanticism versus cynicism, hope versus nihilism, modernization versus tradition, and the erosion of the bushido code in postwar, Westernized Japan. A small, furious novel.
]]> Twilight of the Superheroes 25785 225 Deborah Eisenberg 0312425937 Greg 4
A few of the stories lack the clarity and audacity of the collection's best, and occasionally Eisenberg's structural experimentation becomes frustrating or precious. Still worth your while, though.]]> 3.63 2006 Twilight of the Superheroes
author: Deborah Eisenberg
name: Greg
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/06/01
shelves:
review:
The best of these stories � the title story and "Some Other, Better Otto" � are perfectly misshapen masterpieces chronicling The Way We Live Now. These are stories not only about the biggest questions of ethics and identity, but also about the processes by which we go about asking and answering such questions for ourselves.

A few of the stories lack the clarity and audacity of the collection's best, and occasionally Eisenberg's structural experimentation becomes frustrating or precious. Still worth your while, though.
]]> <![CDATA[The Whore's Child and Other Stories]]> 12366
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling Empire Falls—also named the year's best novel by Time—Richard Russo now focuses, in his first book of short fiction, on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, he captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.

We warm to these newcomers—as to all Russo's characters—almost despite ourselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he'd harbored. A precocious fifth grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as he watches his parents' marriage dissolve. Another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape whose actual purpose he learns only after the fact. An elderly couple rediscovers the power, and the misery, of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island. And in the title story, a septuagenarian nun invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.]]> 240 Richard Russo 009943752X Greg 3 3.74 2002 The Whore's Child and Other Stories
author: Richard Russo
name: Greg
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/05/30
shelves:
review:

]]> House of Leaves 24800
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.]]> 710 Mark Z. Danielewski Greg 1 4.11 2000 House of Leaves
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2007/05/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Jesus� Son 608287 Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:
Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Two Men
Out on Bail
Dundun
Work
Emergency
Dirty Wedding
The Other Man
Happy Hour
Steady Hands at Seattle General
Beverly Home']]> 160 Denis Johnson 0060975776 Greg 4 4.16 1992 Jesus’ Son
author: Denis Johnson
name: Greg
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/26
shelves:
review:
Brilliantly written almost-stories, each of which is frustratingly less than the sum of its parts. Symphonic as a whole, though. I read it in a sitting.
]]> Long for This World 827377 448 Michael Byers 0618446486 Greg 4 3.60 2003 Long for This World
author: Michael Byers
name: Greg
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2007/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Big Bad Love 539933 228 Larry Brown 0679734910 Greg 3
These stories are also sunk deep within the Southern oral tradition—so much so, in fact, that not all of them seem to work as printed literature. The plots of most of the stories are episodic, and the writing is weighted heavily toward exposition over scene. The strongest stories in the collection�"Sleep" and the novella "92 Days"—are the ones that buck this trend.

In all, though, I'd recommend Big Bad Love on the strength of its narrators' voices alone. "My dog died," the title story's narrator tells us at the story's opening. "I went out there in the yard and looked at him and there he was, dead as a hammer. Boy, I hated it. I knew I'd have to look around and see about a shovel. But it didn't look like he'd been dead long and there wasn't any hurry, and I was wanting a drink somewhat, so I went on out a little further into the yard to see if my truck would crank and it would, so I left." And even though the story that follows doesn't completely cohere, it's a simple pleasure just to sit back and let this deep-fried Southern men speak.]]> 4.11 1990 Big Bad Love
author: Larry Brown
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2007/05/01
date added: 2007/05/12
shelves:
review:
Brown's stories, all save for one written in the first-person, feature wonderfully authentic narrative voices. As a transplanted Southern male, the rhythms and dictions of Brown's narrators were nearly enough to give me flashbacks. However, the narrators were largely undifferentiated; they bled into one another, and the voice that had seemed so singularly wonderful when I read the first story felt somewhat threadbare by the time I finished the closing novella.

These stories are also sunk deep within the Southern oral tradition—so much so, in fact, that not all of them seem to work as printed literature. The plots of most of the stories are episodic, and the writing is weighted heavily toward exposition over scene. The strongest stories in the collection�"Sleep" and the novella "92 Days"—are the ones that buck this trend.

In all, though, I'd recommend Big Bad Love on the strength of its narrators' voices alone. "My dog died," the title story's narrator tells us at the story's opening. "I went out there in the yard and looked at him and there he was, dead as a hammer. Boy, I hated it. I knew I'd have to look around and see about a shovel. But it didn't look like he'd been dead long and there wasn't any hurry, and I was wanting a drink somewhat, so I went on out a little further into the yard to see if my truck would crank and it would, so I left." And even though the story that follows doesn't completely cohere, it's a simple pleasure just to sit back and let this deep-fried Southern men speak.
]]> A Bit on the Side 386404 256 William Trevor 067003343X Greg 4 3.87 2004 A Bit on the Side
author: William Trevor
name: Greg
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2007/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> After Rain 493323 After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor

In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation.
Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try.]]> 212 William Trevor 0140258345 Greg 5 4.11 1996 After Rain
author: William Trevor
name: Greg
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2007/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rabbi in the Attic: And Other Stories]]> 654197 239 Eileen Pollack 1883285089 Greg 3 3.67 1991 The Rabbi in the Attic: And Other Stories
author: Eileen Pollack
name: Greg
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Life of Pi 4214 460 Yann Martel 0770430074 Greg 2 3.94 2001 Life of Pi
author: Yann Martel
name: Greg
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/05/11
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]]> Go Down, Moses 17726 Ěý
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.]]> 365 William Faulkner 0679732179 Greg 4 3.93 1942 Go Down, Moses
author: William Faulkner
name: Greg
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1942
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/05/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway]]> 4625 THE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection. For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.]]> 650 Ernest Hemingway 0684843323 Greg 5 4.30 1987 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Greg
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1987
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/05/11
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