Illustrations enhance the already vivid storytelling.
An inspired collection of 20 stories, brilliant in its command of tone and narrative perspective.
Among the features that distinguish the latest from Chicago author Meno (The Boy Detective Fails, 2006, etc.) are illustrations for each story by a top graphic artist (Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns and Archer Prewitt among them). Another plus: Some of the proceeds will help support 826Chicago, a tutoring center for student writers from the McSweeney’s magazine combine. Creativity and empathy mark the collection. Most of the narrators (and/or protagonists) are misfits at odds with the world or with themselves—brothers involved in complex relationships; lovers who have yet to consummate their affairs or have become estranged; kids misunderstood or misused by adults. They often reveal more to the reader than they know about themselves, as they struggle to learn, as one wife tells her husband, “how to be happy in a world that isn’t as good as you think it should be.” The most astonishing story is “Airports of Light,” in which a woman’s malignant tumor is depicted as a city growing inside her, one where her lover can travel if he’s willing to abandon the world he knows. Another standout, “The Unabomber and My Brother,” mixes fact and fiction, while the elliptically rich opening story, “Frances the Ghost,” about a “small, strange girl” who is both very precocious and very disturbed, shows how Meno’s tales reveal themselves gradually, in stages. Titles tell the tales: “Miniature Elephants Are Popular” features pets the size of tiny dogs, “Art School Is Boring So” offers the ruminations of a student who “hates mass production but…secretly likes Britney Spears.” “What a Schoolgirl You Are” addresses the reader as a teenaged girl and “Oceanland” details the world’s most decrepit family theme park. Two of the shorter stories, “The Boy Who Was a Chirping Oriole” and “Iceland Today,” read more like postmodern gimmicks, but even here Meno is never less than amusing.
Illustrations enhance the already vivid storytelling.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933354-47-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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