Customer Reviews

All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories

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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.

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!

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.

Lee K. Abbot writes with clarity and authority about those odd spaces in our lives that are least discernable to ourselves and to others. His subjects and narrators tumble through the mental tumults of drunken stupors, layered confusions, daydreams and heartbreaking epiphanies, yet all the while, we as readers can see each moment clearly. It is one hell of a magic trick and Lee K. Abbot is one hell of a writer.

I find I have to take a level of focus to Abbott's work that at times tires me. His rapid-fire references, metaphors, similes and colloquialisms often exclude and alienate me, the reader, from the very world he is trying to evoke.

On other days, when my heart is open and my mind is clear, the slow, dense reading rewards with the gold of insight and shared experience.

I grow weary of the odd beddings between alienated men and women, the bluff and bizarre relations between men, and a melancholia that skirts alkie sentimentalism by staying wry, but I am often moved by the various narrators' accurate and unsparing self-appraisals.

Surprising turns of phrase delight like, "a lady with a lively haircut that would have looked sharp on Elvis Presley's corpse" and "she had the posture of a hat rack" let you know you're in the hands of a pro ("Martians"). It's just that the reading itself sometimes demands more than it delivers.

Lee K. Abbott's writing covers the human spectrum: generosity, greed, happiness, despair, beauty and ugliness. I alternately thought, "I know people like that," and "I don't ever want to know anyone like that." An unforgettable book!

Once upon a time I heard Lee Abbott read one of his short stories at a writing conference. His use of language is symphonic. Once again I'm in awe of this master of words and the depth he shows in his characters, so true it hurts.

For the most part, the stories collected here are very good. Some of them are staggeringly good. The only thing I would note is that the story uses the same limited number of scenarios (and to a smaller degree character types), a few too many times. That's not to say variation does not adequately set them apart, but it makes the end of the collection a little less pressing to arrive at.

Juno Diaz has said that he read short story collections by many writers and learned from every author. Abbott's writing is "hailed by the best minds in in American short fiction, among them Ann Beattie, Frederick Busch, and Richard Ford" per William Giraldi, who also says in "The Georgia Review" that Abbott is "a writer's writer, rarely reaching out to the middle-class white female," although I am one, and I love his stories -- his characters, his humor, his voice. Women, come see what you have missed.
His humor, and as Giraldi says, "his mythmaking, his ecstatic vision of squalor and grandeur...should be at the center of our new-found zeal for the short story." Read Abbott for pure enjoyment, (or to learn) for his humor and pathos, and for demonstrating that we humans are lovable characters, especially when we are the most human, when wrong and when wronged -- that the human condition can be touchingly beautiful, tragic, and humorous all at once -- an aptly titled collection, indeed.