Customer Reviews

Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

People often romanticize the SouthWest, imagining coyotes and endless desert and cowboys; however modernity has cut off a lot of the romance. Wal*marts, strip malls, endless bars, parking lots, concrete offices, endless cold air chilling the outdoors dot this landscape. Harty knows this and invigorates his character, develops his plots and gives people a history, an emotional depth deeper than any desert valley. I am not sure whether his one more science short story in this collection is a hit or miss-a rather Bradbury-esque story, it is off from the rest of the book. His teenage/young adule male characters are intense, brooding, lost, and not always likeable-but you won't forget them. Their is a palable sadness, a desolateness nature in his writing, it is very moody, but there is a kind of hope borne of small suburban trials and tribulations that keeps you reading.

This book contains stories with contemporary characters so life-like you might feel like emailing one or two with your thoughts. The backdrop of Arizona is a setting that is at once organic and otherworldly, like a lunar landscape. The dialogue is surprising and clear-toned. These are vivid and haunting stories.

"Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona" caught my eye for two reasons, one is the fact that it kept popping up as a recommended collection of short stories to read and two the fact that it is a award winning collection.

This collection is comprised of eight stories, ranging from 15-30 pages in length.

The stories start off very mild & somewhat slow in this collection. The first story "What Can I Tell You About My Brother? has alot of promise starting out, but didn't end with the flare I'd hoped for. The next two stories "Ongchoma" and "Between Tubac and Tumacaori" seemed to slow things down quite a bit.

However the collection picks up momentum and never looks back after the fourth story "Crossroads".

The next four stories are great, two of them outstanding stories that I would recommended for anyone to read.

"Sarah at the Palace"
"Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down" (outstanding story)
"Don't Call It Christmas"
"September" (outstanding story)

This award winning collection may not be for everyone, but it proves that Ryan Harty has a spot secured among the current top short story writers.

Other recommended short stories collections similar to this are Trash: Stories & Animal Crackers: Stories

Enjoy~

Ryan Harty has wowed me with this prize-winning collection.
Each of the eight stories deals with sadness in indelible forms. One of my favorites in the collection centers around a husband and wife and their robot son who seems to be coming apart. The ways in which each family member handles the boy's breakdown mirror survival techniques of people dealing with illness: The wife distances herself; the husband tries to fix the situation; and the son tries to hide his problems.

In another story, a brother cleans the apartment of his dead, mentally ill sister and ends up sweeping all of her cats out onto the street.

The last story, September, is a gorgeous account of one young man's first love: the mother of one of his friends.

I highly recommend this SSC!

A truly exceptional new collection. I came to Harty's work through the 2003 "Best American Short Stories," where I read his beautiful, memorable "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down." The story concerns a man who's facing a choice between his wife and his very human-seeming android son, who keeps breaking down despite his parents' best efforts. Far from seeming sci-fi-ish or even magical-realistic, the story draws its power from its sharp realism--you believe in this father's pain because Harty makes the situation so tangible, both in its physical and its emotional aspects. The stories in this collection are intimately concerned with the bonds of family and friendship; "Crossroads" follows a pair of brothers to a Led Zeppelin concert in the final days before the older brother departs for Vietnam, and in "What Can You Tell Me About Your Brother," we see a younger brother struggling with conflicting loyalties to school friends and to his troubled older brother. In all the stories, we're drawn along by our concern for the sharply-rendered, painfully believable characters. Ryan Harty's voice is smart, funny, sad, and memorable. It's fortunate for all of us that the John Simmons Award brought this outstanding new talent to light.

While I was reading this book, I couldn't wait to get home from work so I could fall back into the stories. Now I'm walking around with the characters in my head, like old friends. It's a beautiful book, the kind you want to recommend to everyone you know. Ryan Harty is a wonderful writer.

I love short stories, and I lived for a while in Arizona, so a friend recommended this book to me. I thought it was amazing. Every story is riveting, and the characters are all incredibly complex and real. The stories pull you in and don't let go of you until the very end, and even then they stay with you (which is the truest sign of whether something is really good, I think). I loved "What Can I Tell You About My Brother?" and "Ongchoma" and "Crossroads." Harty is great at capturing family relationships, especially between brothers. He gets Arizona down perfectly. I can't wait to read whatever he writes next.

I got an advance copy of Ryan Harty's forthcoming collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona and was blown away by the stories. The pieces in this collection hail from the other side of the emotional train tracks, a place where chaparral and saguaros fill the lots where homes and families should be. With subtlety and control, Harty makes arroyos run with missed opportunity and sunsets burn red with loneliness. Yet these stories are far from empty-through them cruise rock stars, Kachina gods and a robotic boy who's more real than real. In one story, a friend wads up another's wedding vows, while elsewhere, a brother sends his dead sister's cats scurrying into the Vegas night. Harty knows the way young lovers stumble toward one another, and he knows the phantom pains of separation. As one character points out in "Between Tubac and Tumcacori," "At a certain point in your life country music is all you want to hear." While the eight stories in Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona lack the twang and swagger of a western tune, they contain the same essential tales of love and loss, and they stick in your head just as long, rolling around for days and days.

After reading Harty's "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down" from Best American Short Stories, I had to get his collection, "Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona." I'm glad I did. He writes amazingly real characters and puts them in amazingly real moments. One of his recurring themes seems to hauntingly deal with nostalgia. How do we let it, and how should we let it affect our present reality? If you like Raymond Carver, I think you'll appreciate this collection. It's beautiful, fairly spare writing, that, like Carver, leaves much in the hands of the reader. Enjoy the sadness.

I usually find collections of short stories hard to wade through, but this collection from Ryan Harty was just the opposite. We all have sadness in our lives, be it small or huge. Most of us have learned to laugh an ironic laugh and not talk about it. But Harty sure can write about it. He taps into the sadness in his characters in a way that is unique to my experience, and he does this in a way that made me feel better about my own little sadnesses. His characters are just so "real", they jump off the page fully drawn after just a few paragraphs. And Harty writes with a quiet calmness (the matter of factness of the characters concerning their situations helps you like them) that is marvelous.

The book is not perfect, there are small things here and there that show he isn't a seasoned pro, but I wager you won't find a book better at what it is good at this year.

Enough gushing. Buy this book if you like good writing.