Those seeking challenging, nontraditional wordplay stories will find much here to ponder.
Short stories that will puzzle, perplex, and provoke.
Irishman Hayden’s first book is a collection of 19 stories that invite readers into some puzzling and unfamiliar places: symbolic, surrealist, and language-based worlds. His tales are reminiscent of his countryman Samuel Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing. Hayden’s book might be subtitled Texts with the Stories Gone. “Dick” is drawn directly from the Beckett playbook. It begins: “Dick is buried up to his belly on a cold shingle beach.” Little happens; descriptions of the surroundings are given. “He laughs. He is full of words. They bubble out of his mouth and dribble down his chin.” Hayden eschews conventional plots, characters, and narrative flow for ambiguity and words. Striking images and metaphors and new, compound words—“thatmakes,” “andeverything”—abound. He invites readers to participate, to peel back the prose, reveal the very process of reading. “Reading” imagines readers as writers living in their own books. As the eponymous narrator of “The Auctioneer” tells us: “The essence of the book is another thing entirely, not the words as such but what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free.” Some stories have a fairy-tale quality to them, like “How to Read a Picture Book.” Meet Sorry the Squirrel—“My real name is Maximilian Liebowitz,” he says, "but you wouldn't be able to pronounce that now, would you kiddies?" He instructs a group of “little darlings” on how to read a picture book. Some stories possess a grisly, Brothers Grimm quality. In one, a platter with the “blackened, smoking corpse of a man” is on display at a dinner party. Another begins: “My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me.” In the ghostly “Memory House,” the narrator keeps seeing (maybe) a stranger in his house or maybe it's himself, a “piece of me.”
Those seeking challenging, nontraditional wordplay stories will find much here to ponder.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945492-11-2
Page Count: 219
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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