From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hempel's four collections of short fiction are all masterful; while readers await the follow-up to last year's acclaimed
The Dog of the Marriage, this compendium restores the full set to print. The first of Hempel's books,
Reasons to Live (1985), is justly celebrated by Rick Moody in his preface as a landmark of its era's "short-story renaissance"; it introduces Hempel's unmistakable tone, where a "besieged consciousness," Moody says, hones sentences to bladelike sharpness "to enact and defend survival." The second,
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), is the main reason to buy this book: used copies are scarce, and the collection contains stories like "The Harvest." Hempel's genius, whether in first or third person, is to make her characters' feelings completely integral to the scenes they inhabit; her terse descriptions become elegantly telegraphic—and telepathic—reportage, with not a word wasted and not a single fact embellished. Her great subject is the failure of human coupling, and she charts it at every stage: giddy beginnings, sexy thick-of-its, wan (or violent) outcomes, grim aftermaths. Seeing it laid out kaleidoscopically in this volume is an awesome thing indeed, and a pleasure lovers of the short story will not want to deny themselves.
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*Starred Review* With the publication of her first book of short stories,
Reasons to Live (1985), Hempel earned a strong position in the vanguard of the minimalist school of fiction writing, in vogue at that time and especially significant in the short story genre. Her three succeeding collections of stories, the most recent being
The Dog of the Marriage (2005), maintained her high stature as a short story writer. She generally continued to compose tightly hewn stories despite the fact that minimalism as a stylistic movement was shrinking around her like a drying riverbed. The stories from her previous collections are gathered here into a single volume, and her achievement in the form is now boldly obvious. She has never imitated, never been just a somewhat anonymous member of a pack of talented storywriters. She is an original, having found--and kept--her unique way of expressing her not so much cut-and-dried as deeply penetrating vision. As the 70-page story "Tumble Home" testifies, Hempel can write longer than usual for her, and certainly that interior monologue by a patient in a mental institution is arresting in its pristine tracing of a pattern of thought. Nevertheless, she is at her best by far in the short, highly imagistic, sparely plotted, stiletto-keen slice of narrative that in her hands glistens in its sheerness, and for that she has made short story history.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
by Amy Hempel
by Amy Hempel
by Mark Richard
by Charles D'Ambrosio
by Thom Jones
