Tracks wide-ranging characters through love, loss, paranoia and desire.
McAllen’s short story collection deals with love, death, sex, loss and pain.
One man’s apartment is taken over by lizards who read his newspaper and smoke his cigars. Another man, fresh out of bed with one woman, bonds with a second woman when they share a train ride and a conversation about Norman Mailer. A third man reminisces about a baseball game and seeing Mickey Mantle take the field. These varied characters populate McAllen’s strong debut collection. The imagined lizards appear in “Love and Lizards,” the heartfelt story of Stanley, a man who pays visits to his psychiatrist and can’t quite come to terms with the losses he’s experienced in his life. The four-page title story is a standout. In a passage that highlights McAllen’s evocative prose, young Larry is walking home alone along a cracked road and imagining that the wind is talking to him and that there are wild animals following him. He tilts his “head skyward and sniffed at the air the way he had watched wild animals doing it on TV….For a moment, he thought he smelled bacon, but as the air rushed in, the scents and smells changed; leaves, dirt, leather, horses, all of the smells in his recollection seemed to pass by in one swift moment.” The simple snapshot of a boy walking along the road while imagining a wild animal in his midst becomes a meditation on contemporary culture and familial relationships. While this story succeeds, some are too brief to reveal much about the characters. McAllen’s writing, however, is strong, and he does an excellent job of building scenes and settings and creating memorable characters, such as a widower who poignantly recalls his last days with his wife. Some of the 20 stories are more successful than others, but overall, it’s a promising debut.
Tracks wide-ranging characters through love, loss, paranoia and desire.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481121361
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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