Tell Me: 30 Stories [Paperback]

Mary Robison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2002

Chosen from Robison's three long-unavailable collections, along with four new stories, Tell Me reflects the early brilliance as well as the fulfilled promise of Mary Robison's literary career. In these stories (most of which have appeared in The New Yorker), we enter her sly world of plotters, absconders, ponderers, and pontificators. Robison's characters have chips on their shoulders; they talk back to us in language that is edgy and nervy; they say "all right" and "okay" often, not because they consent, but because nothing counts. Still, there are small victories here, small only because, as Robison precisely documents, larger victories are impossible. Here then, among others, is "Pretty Ice," chosen by Richard Ford for The Granta Book of American Short Stories, "Coach," chosen for Best American Short Stories, "I Get By," an O. Henry Prize Stories selection, and "Happy Boy, Allen," a Pushcart Prize Stories selection. These stories-sharp, cool, and astringently funny-confirm Mary Robison's place as one of our most original writers and led Richard Yates to comment, "Robison writes like an avenging angel, and I think she may be a genius."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mary Robison's stories are infused with a quiet menace. The trick of her writing is the way she uses the reader's own expectations to create that sense of unease. Her stories--published over the years in The New Yorker and now collected in Tell Me--are made of handfuls of moments, put together without benefit of the usual revelatory short story structure. In "Coach," a football coach and his family move to a new town and try to fit in. In "I Am Twenty-One," a newly orphaned college student takes an art history exam. This lack of plot makes us yearn for conflict, and we begin to imagine all sorts of things going wrong, all sorts of dramatic turns of event. They don't come, usually, and this dynamic of unfulfilled expectation results in strangely effective stories. Of course, none of this would matter if Robison couldn't write. But she can, beautifully and without showiness. She has a neat way of making her themes resonate across every line of a story. In "Independence Day," a woman splitting up with her husband finds her old life slipping away. At one point, her daughter Hallie rides away from their house on her bike: "Hallie spun off on her ten-speed. The bike made the promising ticking noises of time speeded up, of escape." Robison is the rare minimalist whose bare-bones fiction is actually a pleasure to read. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

Thirty brief, sharply delineated short stories written over three decades by Robison (Days) chronicle emotional dislocation with witty dispassion. Robison's characters, usually members of middle-class families, are often pictured grappling with the redefinition of roles, such as the teenaged star-gazing narrator of "An Amateur's Guide to the Night" and her pill-popping single mother who pass for sisters and go on double-dates together. Or the newly idle Helen of "Independence Day," recently returned to her father's grand lakeside house in Ohio, who halfheartedly resists the pressure of her estranged husband, Terry, to get on with her life. Epiphanies are of less interest to Robison than rendering the shimmering immediacy of situation: "I could be getting married soon. The fellow is no Adonis," establishes straightaway the art teacher of "In Jewel," whose engagement means a way out of the dead-end eponymous miner town she's always lived in. Robison locates her fairly comfortable characters anywhere from Beverly Hills ("Smoke") to Ophelia, Ohio ("While Home"), to Washington, D.C ("Smart"); they are waiting for rides in the rain or for babies to be born or for life, simply, to go on. And in every story her characters make valiant, hit-or-miss attempts to connect with one another. The brevity of these tales sometimes leaves the reader hanging, especially since their author delights in oblique details and non sequiturs. Yet nothing is superfluous, and in the spare sadness of Robison's prose entire lives are presented. As the fianc‚e of "In Jewel" concludes, "All that I've ever owned or had is right out here for you to examine."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (October 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432589
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432588
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #527,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not filled out enough, March 5, 2004

By 

ostawookiee "ostawookiee" (Winston-Salem, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Tell Me: 30 Stories (Paperback)

Robison's style of writing short stories is to plunk you down in the middle of a scene to give you a momentary glimpse in the life of others. However, nothing really monumental happens during these glimpses, and the story just ends at some arbitrary comment by one of the characters, leaving you wonder what her point was. This style works when there's conflict and you're left wondering what happens next, but Robison doesn't build any.

However, her writing is very pleasing strictly from an aesthetic sense, she describes people and places well, and does a fairly okay job of character development, but there's not much motivation because as I said, there's no conflict or suspense or hint at plot.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Stories, July 23, 2003

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tell Me: 30 Stories (Paperback)

These are all great stories. Mary Robison's Tell Me is a terrific collection of contemporary short stories. They mostly involve women with some sort of artistic bent stuck in a plastic suburban world that somehow suffocates them, yet these women are not miserable or suffering. They simply deal with their lives in an effective way. I enjoyed reading this collection. It's a good one.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars her greatest hits, December 7, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Tell Me: 30 Stories (Paperback)

classic stories such as "Coach" and "Pretty Ice" and "Yours" are finally together in one volume!