Pleasant streams-of-a-consciousness now a generation old.
Seventeen stories, some from the New Yorker, GQ, and Best American Short Stories, are co-winner of this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award.
“I remember summer better than I remember winter, day better than night, and the white litter of Broadway flying waist high when the wind picked up,” says a typical Allen narrator. When not in a first-person, simulated-memoir mode, the third-person stories are about a character named George, who might very well be the author of the rest of these stories, many of them quite admirable even if they do read more like monologues than narratives. It’s as if they’d taken their cue from standup rather than Chekhov. Reading Allen’s pieces is like listening to the same gorgeous Chopin mazurka over and over while flipping through a Life magazine from October 1988. In other words, plot summary doesn’t tell you much, but here goes: “River of Toys” is a man’s meditation on the riverside shack he once inhabited, as it comes to stand for a period of youthful and poignant innocence; a small-college rhetoric instructor in “Night of the Red Palm” contemplates his lot as he tries to talk a student through her faulty essay on her brother’s death; “Hungry Hungry Hippos” is a dreamy meditation on post-college pop culture indulgence that nevertheless smacks nicely of nostalgia and lyricism; a man who goes to have a cyst removed from his testicles (“A Lover’s Guide to Hospitals”) goes into a reverie about everything he thought of hospitals as a boy; “In a City with Dogs” is a memory of days and nights in a tedious but indelible New York City; the disposal of a man’s remains (“Ashes North”) is cause for his sons, finally, to consider what it means to be men in late-’80s America; and “Singing Pumpkins” is another reverie triggered by a grandmother’s accident with cigarette lighters, leading to memories of an amusement park adjacent to CIA headquarters.
Pleasant streams-of-a-consciousness now a generation old.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-8203-2558-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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