The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
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4.3 • 17 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year
“Amy Hempel’s dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim” (San Francisco Chronicle) and this celebrated volume gathers together her complete work—four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.
Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience.
For readers who have known Hempel's work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hempel's four collections of short fiction are all masterful; while readers await the follow-up to last year's acclaimed The Dog of the Marriage, this compendium restores the full set to print. The first of Hempel's books, Reasons to Live (1985), is justly celebrated by Rick Moody in his preface as a landmark of its era's "short-story renaissance"; it introduces Hempel's unmistakable tone, where a "besieged consciousness," Moody says, hones sentences to bladelike sharpness "to enact and defend survival." The second, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), is the main reason to buy this book: used copies are scarce, and the collection contains stories like "The Harvest." Hempel's genius, whether in first or third person, is to make her characters' feelings completely integral to the scenes they inhabit; her terse descriptions become elegantly telegraphic and telepathic reportage, with not a word wasted and not a single fact embellished. Her great subject is the failure of human coupling, and she charts it at every stage: giddy beginnings, sexy thick-of-its, wan (or violent) outcomes, grim aftermaths. Seeing it laid out kaleidoscopically in this volume is an awesome thing indeed, and a pleasure lovers of the short story will not want to deny themselves.
Customer Reviews
Unequivocally great!
Absolutely one of the best short story collections I've ever read. Beautifully written. I cannot recommend it enough.