Customer Reviews

One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This box of stories is such a treat! The stories in each of the three books might come from the same tradition and share some sensibilities (the precision of language, lovingly crafted sentences), but each has its own voice, style, and character. And that's part of the pleasure: each book is a discovery! Dave Eggers's collection, for example, is full of miniature portraits, the characters (some named, others nameless) caught in strange predicaments (a boy named Charles, who never has his picture taken; a woman named Puma, who has so many friends she must find a way to escape them). In Sarah Manguso's book, a narrator alternates between peculiar experiences of the adult life and the memories of childhood, each childhood vignette a perfect life lesson (an incident with a cruel science teacher, an encounter with a class bully), though the outcome of each is wonderfully unexpected. Deb Olin Unferth's stories are mysterious and surreal (objects disappear in foreign countries, a woman is transformed into a machine and has an affair), often hilarious ("Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A bit of a brat, so they say. But his wife loved him."), but also recognizable and heartbreaking.

And of course, like all McSweeney's books, this set is exquisitely made. A real treasure!

Unferth's Minor Robberies is a rare treat: at times metafictional, at times formally experimental, at times just plain wacky, these short-short stories delight without becoming glib. Standout stories include "Sickos" which features a "very vaguely, very religious" sex worker, "Give Them the Bag" a funny and strangely heart-breaking tale of sisters traveling together, and "Single Percent" a mathematical analysis of romantic commitment. Bring this lovely book with you everywhere so you can catch a story whenever you have a few minutes.

The three books in this set complement each other well. Although I enjoyed all three, Deb Olin Unferth's Minor Robberies stands out in this group. It is delightfully humorous, adventurous, and with a touch of mystery at times. Unferth's stories cover various topics from relationships, to families, to South American travel, to the lives of great composers and architects. Each story has its own life and ends up in a different place, sometimes an unexpected one. Her stories are accessible, I felt compelled several times to call my friends and read to them out loud. Unferth has a talent for changing an entire story around in one line, and sometimes changing it back with the next. All of the books in this set are carefully written, stylistically interesting and worth reading. I highly recommend it!

These stories are small, sharp, lovely, and giving. Read Deb Olin Unferth's "To Be Honest". Then read it again. And again. Each time it expands, contracts, twists into a tiny ball, then grows giant. This is an amazing trio of books in the prettiest of mcsweeney's packages. the perfect present (who isn't psyched for dave eggers in their stocking) if there are still any left. i bought 3.

This is a wonderful book set. This is just lovely. I hope to give it to a close friend or a daughter someday.

I enjoy the increasingly popular and demanding form of the short-short and flash and wish there were more collections like these. Deb Olin Unferth's "Minor Robberies" is, far and away, the strongest book of the bunch, and it's this collection I'm focusing on and awarding 5 stars. The other two have their merits, but having read Manguso and Egger's other work, I don't think the flash is their forte.

Deb Olin Unferth's pieces are strange, cubist, experimental, funny, frightening. Some of them aren't stories at all, but assemblages of mercurial thought. Others evince the clear influence of Diane Williams and Lydia Davis, among others, but that's not a bad thing. The best of the bunch, in my opinion, are the more narrative-oriented stories, such as The Container, Soap, Managing, and---my favorite---Juan the Cell Phone Salesman.

I award the box five stars for Unferth's book alone. It'll be a collection I return to every now and then in the future.

Deb Unferth, Dave Eggers and Sarah Manguso are just extremely entertaining. This box is a treasure. I have it by my bed on my nighttable (along with a Harper's, a New Yorker and a Bernhardt book) and each night before bed I read a few stories. They give me interesting dreams. And they entertain me and take my mind off the day, into a better, weirder, funnier place. If not "magic"--because these are realistic stories about the drama between lovers, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, neighbors and ex-lovers, postmen and customers, salesmen, fashion models and etc--they have a humor and intensity that brings through the layer of magic that does exist in our world--to the extent that we all feel its hovering possibility, it's here. I'll be reading these for a while. I had the chance to ask David Sedaris what he was reading, and he said this book, and so I picked it up.

As a huge fan of short stories, and someone who thoroughly enjoyed both Manguso's (The Two Kinds of Decay) and Eggers' (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) memoirs, I had high expectations for these One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box. The 6.5"x 5.0"x 0.5" volumes are lovely, but the ultra-short stories are mostly disappointing.

Of Deb Olin Unferth's (the thickest of the three, with the longest stories), I liked only two: Frank Lloyd Wright and Minute Lives of Great Composers, and abhorred one, the absolutely sick "Sickos." The style of many of them is much like this excerpt from page 94 of Twice, "Did both letters have to come from the bank? Or could one come from him? If one did come from him, would two come from him? Or if nothing came from him, would nothing come twice before something? How long is nothing? Is it this long? Is it this long?" And she uses the word "or" more than any author I've ever read. What's up with that? Although I disliked her stories the most, I put her novel Vacation, published in September, on my reading list, hoping that as with the other two writers, I'll find that she does "bigger" better. Couldn't be worse.

Sarah Manguso's middle-sized book contained the shortest stories, each one under a page in length. Most are mini-anecdote snippets of her life (Brownies, science class, piano lessons). Only one, Sickness, refers to the long debilitating illness that makes up most of her wonderful memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay. They are little different than childhood stories one might hear from a friend.

Dave Eggers' title story, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, is excellent. The surprising Alberto is also pretty good. But his collection, the smallest of the three, can probably best be described as a mixed bag. The first story, Once a Year, and the fourth, She Needs a New Journal, are only two sentences long. The second, Runaway, is so familiar that I suspect it came straight from his memoir. And although his are the most varied in length and content, they rarely rise above so-so.

In summary, skip this esthetically pleasing but unimpressively written set for their memoirs (in the case of Eggers and Manguso). Or, do as I should have, check them out (at least How the Water Feels to the Fishes and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, available separately) from your local library. Better: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso (my rating - five stars), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (my rating - four stars), or New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas (my rating - four stars).

no what is the what, or the others... but nice little pieces by one of the best alive.

Eggers' stories in his little book: How the Water Feels to the Fishes range are refreshing and often hilariously funny and touching, but I was deeply dissapointed by the contributions by the two remaining authors of whom I'd never heard before. Their 'stories' were more often than not artificial, forced, and bassically not worth publishing. Reading Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape I couldn't escape the feeling often reading fragments from a unhappy fourty something wife.

My advice in a nutshell; don't buy the box, instead try to get a hold of "How the Water Feels to the Fishes" somehow (you will love it!), or borrow it from someone who was foolish enough the buy the whole thing.