Customer Reviews

AM/PM

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The only book that's saved my life and never worn out the ass pocket of my twelfth pair of favorite jeans is Amelia Gray's AM/PM, and I can't exactly explain why, but here goes:

When I was in AA I carried around a little pocket-sized Big Book that my sponsor called a "trucker book" because, I guess, I used to be a trucker and trucks don't have bookshelves. But then it wore through my ass pocket and fell out, down a sewer crack probably, and I missed it like hell so I drank again.

Finally I replaced it with the Tao Te Ching, which is amazing if not a bit vague and stupid to pull out if you're a trucker trucking through construction on an icy I-80 while texting and swigging from a flask. I assume that Tao is still in the seat crack in a salvage yard. It was good to me.

AM/PM is the only devotional that's routinely saved my life. People, this book will save your goddamn life! And your jeans, and, God help you, your John Mayer concert T, but not your ex - but probably even your dying dog and hydroplaning semi. This book doesn't care if you drink again or if you ever apologize or keep secrets or have ever run over an already dead dog, because you gave those dogs another chance at an afterlife.

60 days, 60 devotionals, 60 glasses of wine, 60 dead dogs that you can bring back to life. No, you're right. You don't have to.

In AM/PM Amelia Gray writes characters that are utterly bizarre and entirely recognizable (often as ourselves, or myself, at least). It is funny and sad and gross and beautiful. I finished this book completely satisfied yet desperate for more. It's simply gorgeous--inside and out.

This tiny paragraph is a symbol of my love for AM/PM. It is heartfelt and gushing.It is still, all these months later, more than a little in awe. It is fuzzy and warm and also weeping in the corner. It is insufficient but sincerely meant, this tiny paragraph, which is a symbol of my love for AM/PM.

Amelia Gray's AM/PM is an exceptional gem. Her collection of vignettes, anecdotal observations, and shorts are so moving it makes many other works of comparative craft seem bloated and verbose. This book is a force to be reckoned with.

You get a sense of what is going to happen with the cover art. Things are not quite real, instead surreal, they are more than they seem. Such beautiful little moments, that over time add up to a larger picture, to relationships, and at the end you find yourself both satisfied and still wanting more. Kind of like sex, or pizza. This was one of my favorite books of 2009. Keep an eye out for her book Museum of the Weird with FC2 in the near future and seek out her short fiction wherever you can find it, online and in print.

We know Amelia Gray is a good writer because she wrote a tiny white book called AnteMeridian/PostMeridian. We also know she is a good writer because she wrote a little vignette on manhunting with the belly, also known as the Itch. In fact, she wrote 120 original vignettes packed with quirky characters such as the weight calculator Chet, & the veined flooring Olivia, or the stewardess who grilled her foot on the fuselage. But what does fuselage mean? You have to ask that when you are reading short texts with short AM/PM characters. Tony gave me this Amelia Gray meridians before he left Singapore & I realized he was trying to separate the ante from the post & the longitude from the latitude & the east from the west & bone from blood, because as Amelia Gray so wisely stated, "blood has more distance to travel and as a result, the edges of her body are very cold." And yes, the edges of Amelia Gray's characters are very cold and you have to admire how Gray is able to stretch the nuance of her protagonists in order for us to be able to feel her front door. This is the only way you can control every aspect of reading Gray's AM/PM. Another way you can control your reading of her stories is to read the AM vignettes in diurnal times & the PM ones in nocturnal times. But this method did not work out for me because some of the AM stories such as AM:9 or AM:89 are so good that I wanted to cheat & read 18:PM. This was how good some of her stories were.