One of Lee K. Abbott's most exciting selections from All Things, All at Once is now available in a handsome limited edition perfect-bound chapbook. The story follows Mr. DeWine, a high school civics teacher looking for the love that will bring meaning to his middle years, and the two alienated students who plot death, havoc, and woe. A lightning ride from start to finish, with Abbott's signature voice carrying the reader throughout.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
This is fiction in the mode of John Cheever, written for the long run, marking out those days when all you love hovers right there--maybe forever, or maybe it's about to disappear. Lee Abbott is one terrific writer. --William Kennedy
There is often a glimmer of light in his stories, and Abbott's absolutely individual voice broadens that glimmer to a gleam as his characters work at finding a way to live. His sense of shape, and the voice that drives his narrative, are the achievements of a master of the form. --Frederick Busch
All Things, All at Once is...a florid and rich cornucopia of stories, full of exuberance, passion, gravity, consolation, and utter zaniness. It is a rare collection and puts Abbott's great versatility and masterful narrative skills on vivid display. --Richard Ford
There is often a glimmer of light in his stories, and Abbott's absolutely individual voice broadens that glimmer to a gleam as his characters work at finding a way to live. His sense of shape, and the voice that drives his narrative, are the achievements of a master of the form. --Frederick Busch
All Things, All at Once is...a florid and rich cornucopia of stories, full of exuberance, passion, gravity, consolation, and utter zaniness. It is a rare collection and puts Abbott's great versatility and masterful narrative skills on vivid display. --Richard Ford
About the Author
Abbott has won the St. Lawrence award for Fiction and received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Major Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. In addition to appearing in such places as Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Georgia Review, Abbott's stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Abbott has taught Creative Writing at Case Western, Washington University, and Rice University. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife Pam, and teaches in the Creative Writing program at The Ohio State University.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Prophetic Story Readers Will Still Be Reading Five Hundred Years From Now,
By
This review is from: One of Star Wars, One of Doom (Perfect Paperback)
"One of Star Wars, One of Doom" is an omniscient account of a Columbine-like scenario, but in the New Mexican Yoknapatawpha where all of Lee K. Abbott's stories are set. We track a high school teacher and our shooters through the fateful day, and by story's end we see that the choices that lead to their ends are driven by remarkably similar motivations. The strategy of tightly controlled omniscience that Abbott uses is unique in the short story form, so far as I can tell, because it is not only expansive -- moving backward in time by way of memory, and forward in time by way of prolepsis, all in service of the story's characterological and thematic concerns -- but it is also given to a unity and a symmetry of design that will surprise the reader, given all that the story's ambitions come to contain.
When the Columbine tragedy happened, the news media rushed to quick, tidy, and unsatisfying conclusions about the motivations of the killers. Not long after, "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," appeared in the Georgia Review, and its implicit suggestion that the killers' motivations were likely not different in kind from the motivations of nearly every other human being who walks the earth -- and that their active responses to those motivations differed only in degree -- seemed not only reasonable but also likely, and possibly even wise. Here we had a story that resisted the impulse to put a white hat on some characters and a black hat on others, and instead sought to figure out the scarier thing, which is how a person wired up the way you and me and all of us are wired up would come to do such a terrible thing. Within the last year, the diaries and videotapes and other artifacts from the Columbine killers have finally been released to the public. What's most interesting to me is the way "One of Star Wars, One of Doom," quietly predicted what the artifacts would come to teach us about the grievances of the Columbine killers, and years before anyone else could be bothered to do anything but make monsters of them. This is an important story, and one that has too long lived in obscurity. New American Press has done the world a great favor by packaging it for the first time as a standalone chapbook, suitable for the classroom, for Christmas gifts, for the magazine rack in the bathroom -- for anywhere, really, where readers might pick it up and enjoy the pleasures it offers on first read, and then, later, and for a very long time, be haunted by what has been revealed about humankind and our ways of being in the world.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Every Rule Broken for Good Reason,
By Okla Elliott (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: One of Star Wars, One of Doom (Perfect Paperback)
Lee K Abbott breaks nearly every rule of short story writing in "One of Star Wars, One of Doom" -- but always to achieve the effect that "the rules" are designed to facilitate. The omniscient point of view in short stories is hard to pull off, and few contemporary writers try it, but the omniscience in this story is the most effective choice, because it allows for the community consciousness of the high school to emerge. Likewise, using current events, such as the Columbine shootings, is hard to successfully pull off, but in this case it adds depth to the story and the story adds depth to our understanding of the events (not that this story is exactly based on the Columbine tragedy, but the similarities are numerous and clearly intentional).
This story displays flashback, flash-forward, direct address to the reader, humor, authorial intrusion, and many more writerly tactics. It's clear that there's no strategy Lee K Abbott won't use to meet the needs of his story. And it's us, his readers, who gain the most from these efforts.
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