Customer Reviews

Corpus Christi: Stories

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

 

 

Years ago I stopped buying short story collections as I found it to be like buying a CD by a favorite band: There would be the one, popular, Top 10 cut, then the rest of the music would be filler. I was encouraged by a writer-friend to read Corpus Christi and I have to say honestly that each and every story is a gem. This book made me laugh and weep and sing and dance--and weep again--sometimes in the sadness of the story, sometimes in joy at the gift of Johnston's writing. Long ago it seemed the literary world lost the vision of a short story with beginning, middle, end. Here the skill in such craftsmanship is reborn. Bret Johnston deftly chisels every sentence out of the substance that is his beloved medium: the written word.

Thank the muses!

If you love the short story as an art form, buy this book! You won't be disappointed.

A wonderful book.
Sumptuously written with dialogue and detail that remind you of the beauty that is life. There are no "heroes" among these characters and stories...just people who bravely face their surroundings, not just physical (the inevitable hurricane) but emotional as well. There is loss. There is regret. There is everything that memory assails us with; but these stories also tell of what memory rewards us with. This may not be a book for the faint-hearted, for these characters are certainly not. They face their shining moments and imperfections with a grace and courage that makes you glad to know their stories.

One of the biggest literary errors made by new (and even some veteran) writers is to trumpet THE BIG, EMOTIONAL EVENT. Not so with Bret Anthony Johnston's exquisite, powerful debut collection, "Corpus Christi." Whether dealing with madness, a father's violence or broken marriages, Johnston uses both restraint and often humor to paint characters who are as real and flawed as any in modern literature. "Corpus Christi" brings us to places plumbed by Annie Proulx and Dagoberto Gilb but with Johnston's own remarkable imprint.

Every one of these painstakingly birthed short stories
is worth a long discusion and I plan to do
just that with others in my home town who
are forming book groups around Corpus Christi: Stories.

I have never read a writer like Bret Anthony Johnston,
He is a true original..someone to watch.
He never resorts to cliche. His characters are very fresh
and though some are weary and road worn I missed
them when I closed the book after reading the last page.

If you are suffering from media burnout and
the same old same old syndrome, and maybe have had
a little trouble feeling anything these days due
to over or under stimulation, this book will
bathe your soul. You'll love it.

Bret Johnston's debut collection of short stories is an excellent, powerful book. Such talent, compassion and insight coming from such a young writer is extraordinary. Johnston knows his craft, and "Corpus Christi: Stories" is beautifully written.

Bret Anthony Johnston's "Corpus Christi: Stories" is a lighthouse of literary fiction, beckoning readers to see life in a new way. As the verbal architect interweaving the stories, Bret Anthony Johnston builds a foundation fortified by the power and exuberance of his words. In "Waterwalkers," his first story, the ground shifts beneath the relationship of a couple, threatening to forever fissure what they once shared. Johnston, however, forges a touchstone that allows readers to experience their loss, their love and their abiding connections, with his ability to craft a strong, unforgettable narrative.

Johnston's humor, his research (get ready to be amazed at the Karakawa Indians), his visceral knowledge of Texas, and his astute observations offer readers a welcome to characters and circumstances wholly original. If a hurricane threatened my home, my autographed copy of "Corpus Christi: Stories" would be among my prized possessions to protect and save.

Ironically, another famed architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is credited with observing that "less is more" and "God is in the details." After reading "Corpus Christi: Stories," you may agree that Bret Anthony Johnston is van der Rohe's "writing heir apparent" whose stories illuminate these statements. Just as Mies van der Rohe earned his celebrity energizing space in his Farnsworth House and his Berlin museum by designing walls of glass beneath cantilevered beams, Bret Anthony Johnston (whose celebrity includes being a pro skateboarder and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard) energizes the world of Corpus Christi, Texas from his first sentence to his last.

In "Corpus Christi: Stories" when a hurricane approaches Corpus Christi and a "Kmart sign cartwheels across the yard," it feels so real a reader may desire to rush inside, away from threatening winds. Yet Bret Anthony Johnston does not abandon his reader. He walks with us to the edge of a fictional cantilevered beam where we can view the abyss that is the aftermath of heartbreak and struggle.

If there's one book you'll read again and again for its originality and for making you feel exuberant and alive, I respectfully submit it is "Corpus Christi: Stories." (Thank you. Carol Owens Campbell)

I liked it--a book of literary stories anchored around the town of Corpus Christi. By the end of the book all the stories fit together and gave it the feel of a novel. If you like literary short stories, you'll like Corpus Christi.

Bret Johnston's debut collection of fiction signals the arrival of a master storyteller. These are glimpses of lives in a minor key, as his characters struggle to continue in the face of tragedy. At the heart of this book is a novella in three parts which tells the death by cancer of a woman and the son who cares for her in her illness. You won't forget this mother and son; their sadness is palpable, something so authentic you may feel like looking away but can't, it's that real, that wrenching.

The stories in this collection are careful, poignant and highly convincing portraits of well-intentioned but often hapless souls battling external and internal hurricanes. At first read, one might mistake these stories for the accurate and earnest but "tame" stories that one associates with the short story renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s: Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Bausch, etc. And these stories are indeed earnest and sincere; although they have moments of humor, they never feel glib or festive. They certainly are driven by character and not primarily by plot (One exception is the marvellous "Two Liars" in which a father burns his home for the insurance money). But Johnson's gift is that these stories are far less conventional than they appear at first glance--there is always a small but telling surprise, a slight twist that carries us into a world of imaginative genius. To put is bluntly: These stories seem important. They belong alongside the writing of a handful of contemporary short fiction authors (Elizabeth Graver, Kevin Brockmeier) who possess the ability to wade both deep into character *and* far out into the unknown. There's a reason the stories in this collection have been honored by Best New Voices, New Stories from the South, The O. Henry Prize and almost all of the tributes a published story story can obtain today.

The book was well-written and read quickly, but the stories themselves were a bit on the depressing side, and many had the same theme: man and woman meet, fall in love, have kid, kid dies, relationship goes down the crapper.