All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories [Hardcover]

Lee K. Abbott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2006

"Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer."—William Harrison

Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations—common heartbreak, fractured families—and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* With his distinctive literary voice, Abbott claims the short story as his own territory and populates it with 40-ish men with bellies going soft who are products of their pasts--which may include duty in Vietnam--trying to make their best of the present. In these sometimes loosely linked stories, which fall into the author's categories of boy-girl, buddy-buddy, father-son, and futuristic or wacky, Abbot virtually grabs the reader by the neck with his opening sentences and doesn't let go. His territory is the Southwest, often small-town Deming, New Mexico, the hometown to which his protagonists tend to return as adults, and his themes center on love and its loss (husbands, and an occasional wife, stray from their marital beds) and learning about themselves and life in general.^B All of these 24 stories have been previously published in magazines, and many were in Abbott's earlier books, including two as title stories in previous collections; unfortunately, their alphabetical-by-title arrangement doesn't include a chronology. Still, this is Abbott at his best, testosterone level high, with prose that is dense but boisterous and sometimes loopy, language that in itself shows him to be a master at work. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A florid and rich cornucopia of stories, full of exuberance, passion, gravity, consolation and utter zaniness -- Richard Ford

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1 edition (June 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039306137X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061376
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,296,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Intro to a Great Story Writer, August 11, 2006

By 

Mr. Richard K. Weems "emperor_weems" (Fair Lawn, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

Lee K. Abbott is a master of the short story in many ways. Not only does he have several collections, but he is a great teacher of the short form. His writing constantly challenges the boundaries of word use and character. The people who inhabit his stories are disturbed and quizzical to their very souls. They are people who can give accurate golf advice and quote great philosophy. Lee K. Abbott challenges himself to write about great abstractions in everyday life. In this collection we meet Vietnam rejects meeting up with war heroes, where neither can quite find his own place. We meet a man who works out his grief over his recently dead daughter by burglarizing his own house. We learn about a family trait of a kind of speaking-in-tongues that a son has no choice but to inherit, for it is the language of human misery.

This selection, old and new, will show you the possibilities of the English language and the short story form in a way no one else can do. Some of my personal favorite stories are not in here, so if you read this book and are amazed by it and incited towards further curiosity, I would suggest that you immediately acquite yourself a copy of _Strangers in Paradise_ for some of his best work.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book- learn how to write., June 28, 2006

By 

Kacey H. Kowars "kaceyk" (Powell, ohio USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

Lee K Abbott has written a stunning collection of stories; six new stories added to 18 previous stories. This collection serves as a primer for anyone who has aspirations of becoming a writer. The story 'One of Star Wars, One of Doom' is worth the cover price of the book. I was disturbed for an hour after finishing the story (about a Columbine style shooting). Several of these stories contain more emotional impact than most modern novels I read. Highly recommended!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Story Collection I've Read in Years, December 11, 2006

By 

Okla Elliott (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

I already own most of Abbott's story collections, so I was slow to pick up this New and Selected collection. Now that I have it, however, I'm more pleased than ever. The new stories in here are some of the best Abbott has written. "One of Star Wars, One of Doom" is amazing. And the selected stories really are the best from his previous collections (unlike other selected stories or poems collections I've bought).

This collection is a great introduction to Abbott's work and probably one of the best story collections published in the past several years. Buy it. You won't be disappointed.