An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories [Hardcover]

Ann Hood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2004

Ann Hood's edgy short stories, reminiscent of Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson, find the surreal in everyday occurrences.

Looking at her characters as if through a pair of binoculars, Ann Hood captures the extraordinary in the ordinary. A pregnant woman left by her husband cooks obsessively to cope with her loss, but never tastes a morsel. In an attempt to stay sober, a young alcoholic seduces her priest and embarks on a tour of caverns with him. An adolescent girl picks up bird-watching as a hobby and, in her newfound habit of observing others, discovers a budding romance between her mother and her neighbor. These stories, many published in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Story, and The Colorado Review, are full of characters seeking an escape from their lives while uncovering small moments of understanding that often have huge implications and consequences. They discover that they can only find peace once they stop searching for a way out. Through a set of diverse voices and lively storytelling, Hood creates authentic, personal, secret worlds full of eccentric detail.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A first collection by novelist Hood (Something Blue; Ruby; etc.) comprises 11 conventional but affecting stories that suffer from a back-cover comparison to Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson. The first, "Total Cave Darkness," is winning, relating the adventures of the alcoholic narrator (who has a tender love affair with the bottle) and a young, foxy minister on an injudicious road trip. "After Zane," which begins like Amy Hempel's masterful "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep" with a woman who staves off grief through compulsive domesticity, features a narrator who bakes constantly after the father of her unborn child decamps. Wonderful in parts, flabby in others, the story strains, like others here, for a final-page profundity (often via a lovely but easy metaphor). A gentle story about the growing friendship between a pregnant divorcée and a Martha Stewart mom, for example, is marred by an ending that is simultaneously predictable and improbable. But Hood's stories can be quite moving: "Escapes" surprises with a fierce revelation that forges a stronger bond between a troubled young girl and her aunt, while in "The Language of Sorrow" a woman and her grandson grapple with matters of death and new life. Hood is a polished writer and a careful observer, and she walks the popular funny-sad line very well, but perhaps not as adroitly as the convention's aforementioned greats.
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From Booklist

Hood is a seductive storyteller, given her emotionally reckless and nonconformist characters, sensuous detail, precise dialogue, and keen rendition of the inner monologue that so often contradicts what we say and do. She also engineers just the sort of painful and inexplicable familial and romantic predicaments friends spend hours attempting to decipher. A novelist with a loyal following--Ruby (1998) is her most recent--Hood now presents a collection of thorny short stories dramatizing the struggle to get on with life in the wake of divorce or death. Parental love interests Hood as much as romantic love, and she writes with electrifying frankness about child-custody conflicts, teenagers derailed by their father's suicide, a mother who finds the strength to tell her reticent gay son that she accepts who he is, and women facing unwanted pregnancies. But what's most arresting about these stories is their ferocious sexuality, an animality wryly noted in the collection's title and explored in each finely crafted tale with candor, wit, and high regard for women's resiliency and spirit. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (July 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059006
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059007
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,092,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels THE RED THREAD, THE KNITTING CIRCLE and SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF MAINE. Her memoir, COMFORT: A JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF, in which she shares her personal story of losing her 5 year old daughter Grace in 2002, was a New York Times Editor's Choice and named one of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) Stunning moments of clarity, July 13, 2004

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories (Hardcover)

Hood is a consummate writer whose words and images create believable scenes of humanity played out in a variety of relationships. From the strange attraction of opposites to the complicated elements of friendship, Hood speaks with elegant precision, her description of place almost tactile. The stories cover all generations and experiences, as the characters struggle with issues that require courage and not a little resilience, each culminating in a moment of irrevocable truth.

Hood maintains a delicate balance in this impressive collection, selections that illustrate the disparate concerns of everyday lives. Without rendering judgment, each slice-of-life tale reveals real people with complex emotions, navigating through lives fraught with endless decisions; this series renders the commonplace extraordinary, suggesting the inherent danger in choices, given the inevitable consequences and those perfect moments of clarity that strike without warning.

I like the people in these stories, particularly the women, with their common yearning, their angst, in spite of a lack of safety in a constantly changing world. Most characters are relatively young and single, but the married ones juggle the usual concerns of family vs. self and the elderly the burden of too much familiarity with grief. All of them are processing emotions, losses, fears and the unreliability of dreams; in one particularly striking story, the perfect life is shattered by an action that will taint the future of those left in the wake of destruction.

As the title intimates, the author is indeed an observer of behavior, in this case the human variety. Skillfully, the author arranges her protagonists so that they are illuminated, exposing the fragile undersides they try vainly to protect. The inevitable predator, reality, moves closer, the nest breeched and innocence flown, leaving only remnants of a comfort forever relinquished. Luan Gaines/2004.