Customer Reviews

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (American Literature)

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

 

 

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going is an amazing book. It challenges me and makes me want to keep on reading. The author, Damion Searls is fresh, new and invigorating. I look forward to reading more by this author.

This little book of five of Searls' short stories is enchanting. Just the thing for a hot summer day. Funny, quirky, filled with unbelievable characters who are unbelievable but nevertheless remind you of, yeah, that guy you went to grad school with. Whatever happened to him? My favorite was "56 Water Street" and Angela who tries them all out.

Searls has translated all the great writers, but his own fiction is fantastic.

Everyone sees the world differently, and author Damion Searls brings readers his own perspective through a series of short fiction with "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going". The anthology offers his own view of the world through a series of highly entertaining and unique stories. Funny, thought-provoking, and a page-turner, "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going" is a read well worth the investment.

Searls' book is a 100-page engine against inertia. The narrators of these exquisite stories are seeking the thing in their highly intellectualized lives that will "change you, drive you forward," "move you forward," and the book does the same: it reinvents--changes, drives, moves forward--the work of Gide, Hawthorne, Inoue, Nabokov, and Landolfi through its meta-fictional wit, part of which includes inveighing against originality while displaying it. And the book is witty, in style above all. Read it in a Soho café with plush velvet seats or on your lunch break in Silicon Valley, and you'll be the one smiling.