Contents:
I just loved the openeness of the characters.
She writes the most messed up things - I feel guilty for liking them so much sometimes but they are wildly entertaining! As intriguing and startling as these stories are their impact is sometimes muted for reasons that are tough to place. It should perk you right up, hopefully. But the joke made sense in , when the outer narrative of The Remains of the Day is set, as it also did for Coward in Esther in the Night is heartbreaking.
It is very depressing, so don't read it when you are down. Read it when you think your life and family is crazy. It should perk you right up, hopefully. Because if your family is this weird, you are in trouble or maybe you should write your own book and make more money, which would also I have really started to enjoy more and more short fiction.
Because if your family is this weird, you are in trouble or maybe you should write your own book and make more money, which would also lead you to some form of happiness, so it is really a win, win!
Sep 29, Josephine Quealy rated it really liked it Shelves: Homes much earlier in life because I could already have spent all this time walking around with all that perverse, at times depraved, and funny writing tucked safely up inside me. May 18, Erika rated it it was amazing Shelves: I think Homes has found the deepest secrets of humankind and made them terrifyingly ordinary and shockingly real. May 17, Rebecca rated it really liked it Shelves: Mar 04, Catie rated it really liked it.
Jun 13, Jeanie Zwick added it Recommends it for: I recently discovered Homes. She's an excellent storyteller - a whimsical and vivid voice. May 05, Julia Long rated it it was amazing. This beyond brilliant short story collection is definitely in the running for my fav book of all time. I'm humbled by this thing.
I'm so ecstatic and horrified that it exists. I love it so fucking much, Jesus H Christ. It literally changed my life. I still think about it every day. It haunts me in the best and worst way.
I was genuinely disturbed by it but also deeply and painfully inspired. If you can handle it, read it. I'll admit, I see why a lot of people can't take it. I have anxi This beyond brilliant short story collection is definitely in the running for my fav book of all time. I have anxiety issues to put it mildly and this book definitely did make my anxiety spike and my heart pound at times. To me, though, it was worth it.
It's just so goddamn GOOD. This book has both mainstream and subculture appeal. One of my favorite things about the way she writes is probably her word choice. I mean like, she uses the 'right' words, usually simple ones, but just in the right places and they cut so deep. It's like a massage from someone who finds all your spots. Okay, admittedly the first story isn't the best one in the book. It's still really, really good though. It definitely hooks you but it's pretty much all uphill from here. It's so, so good. I want to tell you all about it but then I'd have to put a spoiler alert warning on this review and I just got a Goodreads account and don't know how to do that.
The basic premise of it, to me, was that we try to impress people who are bad for us. That might sound simple but sometimes the best premises are and it's, of course, told as an abstraction. A perfectly subtle, beautiful, terrible, disgusting, disturbing abstraction. I'm trying to find the words for what it meant to me. I don't want it to sound simple when I explain it in a practical way, because it's not simple.
It's an intimate, vulnerable, sensual and sexual tour of a girl who's 'ugly' by society's standards. It's about the American dream seeming and being impossible, yet exciting and desirable. I don't want anyone to get the impression that any of these stories are as simple as I'm making them sound with my 'it's about xyz' descriptions--I just totally understood them; they resonated with me.
There are a lot of other stories in TSOO but I won't review them all because I have to study now and this is already probably too long.
The last story about dating Barbie isn't that good but it's the only sub par one in the collection. In short, this book is phenomenal and I'm glad I discovered Homes. This felt like reading a series of events related to the private life of the contemporary world being pushed to the most radical and unsuspected extremes. Disfunctional couples blaming the way his children are; diverse interpretations of the mind of children in perverse scenarios, and a heartbreaking tale about the pain of a mother with his own blood being in a vegetative state.
One can only imagine a bunch of stories like these that have not been written, waiting for being touched by Homes whil This felt like reading a series of events related to the private life of the contemporary world being pushed to the most radical and unsuspected extremes. One can only imagine a bunch of stories like these that have not been written, waiting for being touched by Homes while they shrive unconcerned in our daily lifes.
Here are some random quotes: In the darkness of the theater they fall in love. He would come up onto the porch, turn the knob, and come into my house. He would take things: I would help him pack. He would take the things that make me who I am, and then I would be able to be someone else. Nov 15, Beem Weeks rated it it was amazing. Homes is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. This one here is a collection of short stories covering many different lives. There are all sorts of quirky characters involved in odd situation that really aren't as odd as they seem.
Homes shines a light into the darkest corners of American suburbia, exposing the real goings-on within these outwardly tight-knit neighborhoods. Kids behaving badly, parents behaving worse than the kids. Homes is as daring an author as can be found A. Homes is as daring an author as can be found today. This is the second Homes offering I've read. I've got two more on my Kindle. She simply does not disappoint as a writer.
Get this one and see just what can be done within the short story medium. Personaggi alle prese con la vita di tutti i giorni, lavoro, famiglia, casa, rapporti di coppia. Uno stile "asettico", quasi una fredda cronaca di momenti e totale assenza di sentimenti.
E all'interno del nucleo, il nulla. Dec 10, Jenny Reading Envy rated it really liked it Shelves: Some short stories are good because they have a twist or surprise in them, or are full of casts of quirky characters. These are the other kind, the type that you'll keep thinking back to because they were full of messed up people doing bizarre things, but somehow they resonate with you, and suddenly you want to go hide in your linen closet and write love letters to yourself. Jul 14, Emily rated it liked it. She writes the most messed up things - I feel guilty for liking them so much sometimes but they are wildly entertaining!
I really struggle with short story collections though because I find them so uneven. There is rarely a collection where I say, "Wow, all these are so great! Mar 05, Shannon Adelaide rated it it was amazing. I love AM Homes' work, and this book of short stories is no different. A quick read, the first and the last stories are absolutely staggering. She manages to take the usual and show how there really is no such thing.
Jan 08, Cat rated it really liked it Shelves: Disturbing and anxiety inducing, but incredibly intimate view of inner lives. The voices in the stories are extremely realistic, and revealing deeply private thoughts. The first story, Adults Alone is a precursor to Music for Torching.
Sep 10, Bree Neely rated it liked it. Technically perfect, but holy crap this woman can write some depressing shit. Very unpleasant to read one story after the next that make you want to claw your eyes out and run screaming into the night. As far as writing goes, however, she's amazing. Homes is a superb writer. Her stories of the perverse always enchant and disturb in equal measure. La mente de A. Apr 04, Luci rated it really liked it. Feb 17, Josephine M. Edwards rated it really liked it Shelves: This is probably the better anthologies I've read of hers.
The infamous Barbie story is actually hilarious if you don't take any offense to it. Once again, there are layers under the surface most people would prefer to ignore. There's less ambiguity and more realness to these stories, some of them being the "safer" stories before Homes was really finding her stride.
To my mind, she's no more shocking than Chuck Palahniuk, and in some cases she's much better. I loved the Music for Torching "prequ This is probably the better anthologies I've read of hers. I loved the Music for Torching "prequel", that the style was identical and that the characters have a lot more worth exploring, so this is like a proof of concept short for that novel. Once again, Homes is walking into different head spaces of various genders and ages while never failing to still keep each voice unique. She's probably one of the few authors who works well with first person, present tense narratives as well as she does third person.
The Bullet Catcher was probably my least favourite, it's still fun but it didn't grip me, and a couple of stories were kind of forgettable. Still definitely worth getting though if you're into Homes or want a better sampler of her work. And I've only just found out this was made into a film with a through narrative, which is weird considering I was thinking of which books of hers would be good to adapt Oct 03, Robert rated it really liked it.
This collection, her first from the early 90s, is quite good. Despite men coming off horribly in every one of these stories that's sort of her brand , she does so many interesting things with concept and weird humor. I may even read another collection of hers. I do have one major quibble: She is a brave writer unafraid to take chances. But this story is crippled by one of the worst first paragraphs I've ever come across in published fiction, let alone the opening story of an otherwise outstanding collection.
The paragraph sets the stage in such an unnecessarily confusing way. It's not just me: I re-read it 7 times and could not figure out for the life of me the simple setup of the story! Don't confuse the reader. The frozen Caroline in The Little Stranger feels more protective of her dog than of the child it savages, and — like her war-damaged brother Roderick — is snobbishly inept when dealing with the lower orders.
The Tallis family in Atonement , when misled by year-old Briony, are all too quick to identify Robbie — the son of the cleaning lady — as a rapist, though the real offender comes from their own social caste. Hollinghurst's Cecil is charismatic, a poet in the manner of Rupert Brooke, but there's a dangerous power about him, a droit de seigneurial swagger, which he doesn't fail to exploit.
These four novels are about much more than country houses: Waters's plays with the conventions of the ghost story, McEwan's has a section on Dunkirk, Ishiguro's is a study in emotional repression, and Hollinghurst's is, among other things, a bibliographical thriller. And insofar as they take property as a theme, they address issues familiar to most of us — everything from inheritance and refurbishment to faulty wiring.
What she calls solemnity has now become a national obsession, fed by endless television documentaries about buying houses and doing them up. Like property pages and estate agent windows with their multimillion-pound homes, country house novels allow us to luxuriate in places we could never own — to linger in long galleries, gaze at ancestral portraits and roam the gardens and parkland.
They're appealing to film companies, too — Atonement and The Remains of the Day became big-budget movies, and there's every chance The Little Stranger and no relation The Stranger's Child will follow suit. But the motivation for these authors isn't the prospect of movie deals. Nor do nostalgia, aestheticism or attachment to privilege play much of a part. What draws them to a country house setting is the space it offers for everything to happen under one roof; the house of fiction has many rooms, but country house fiction has more rooms than most. There's also the opportunity to play with ideas and motifs that date back centuries.
However smartly renovated, the same few themes, characters and plot-twists come up again and again. But is Chatsworth any more quintessentially English than, say, a working-class terrace in Derby or a mobile home in Jaywick? As with the houses, so with the literature. It's arguable that Irish country house literature surpasses ours, because the conflicts it dramatises — both political and religious — are on a larger scale.
William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault , for instance, begins in , during the struggle for independence, with an episode involving the IRA, the British army, an Anglo-Irish landlord, and an arson attack. And the master of the form is surely Chekhov, whose plays — set on country estates under threat of being sold off because their owners are indolent, prodigal, alcoholic or unworldly — have become integral to British theatre.
In The Cherry Orchard currently playing at the National Madame Ranevskaya and her brother Gayev carelessly assume that something will turn up to solve their financial problems, despite warnings from the entrepreneurial Lopakhin that they must act. All your ancestors were serf-owners, possessors of living souls. Don't you see that from every cherry tree, from every leaf and trunk, human beings are peering out at you? Don't you hear their voices? To possess living souls — that has corrupted all of you, those who lived before and you who are living now, so that [you] no longer perceive that you are living in debt, at someone else's expense, at the expense of those who you wouldn't allow to cross your threshold.
We are at least two hundred years behind the times. We only philosophise, complain of boredom or drink vodka. Yet it's quite clear that to begin to live we must first atone for the past. Forthright political condemnation of this sort is rare in British fiction; the atoning that Briony Tallis has to do, in McEwan's novel, is of a different kind. It's difficult to have sex in a flat or a small house without the other occupants noticing: The country house affords more opportunities: In Hollinghurst's new novel — a demure one compared to his earlier work — erotic excitements happen in the linen-room, and in woodland, and the garden at night.
The ultimate achievement in country house sex is Lady Chatterley's Lover , in which Connie finds fulfilment not in the bedroom at Wragby her crippled husband Clifford is impotent and sex with a house-guest, Michaelis, fails to satisfy her , but in a cottage in its grounds, with the gamekeeper, Mellors.
Connie is transformed by the experience "she was gone, she was not, and she was born: Now an old man, the narrator, Leo, recalls the hot summer he spent at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, acting as messenger-boy for the beautiful Marian played by Julie Christie in Joseph Losey's film version and for Ted Burgess Alan Bates , the local tenant farmer with whom — although engaged to marry a viscount — she is having an affair.
In Fielding's novels, the handsome but lowly heroes end up owning country estates. The footman Joseph Andrews has the patronage of Mr Booby to thank and the foundling Tom Jones turns out to be of noble birth; because they're essentially good men, despite some rough and tumble, they merit their good fortune. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights has no such entitlement, either by birth he's a "gypsy brat" from Liverpool or through his behaviour, but he revenges himself on his betters by becoming the owner of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange — a troubling outcome for 19th-century readers and reviewers.
Then there's Dr Faraday in The Little Stranger , whose desire to marry the awkward Caroline isn't easily disentangled from his desire to live in Hundreds Hall. Is it a coincidence or a subtle allusion that the owner of Darlington Hall in Ishiguro's novel is called Farraday? For every surprise possession of a country house, there must also be a dispossession, and fiction is full of these, too. At the start of Sense and Sensibility , John Dashwood succeeds to the Norland estate and defies his father's dying wishes by failing to provide for his three half-sisters and their mother, who're forced to move out and rent the "defective" if charming Barton Cottage.
The romantic twists that follow — is Edward a suitable match for Elinor? Will Marianne end up with Willoughby or Colonel Brandon? Austen heroines aren't so vulgar as to gossip about wealth; they leave that to others "His woods! I have not seen such timber any where in Dorsetshire! But come the denouement, it's unthinkable that their circumstances should be reduced. Spiritual entitlement to a house is a trickier business, though many have experienced the feeling that a place is somehow "right" for them. In Howards End , Mrs Wilcox, whose only passion in life is her country house with its nine windows, five acres and wych-elm, asks that it be left to Margaret Schlegel.
The family ignores the request but Margaret ends up there anyway, as the second Mrs Wilcox. Hollinghurst's new novel opens at a house called Two Acres, where the budding poet Cecil Valance is visiting his friend from Cambridge, George Sawle. As its name suggest, Two Acres is a paltry suburban plot compared with Cecil's estate.
But he writes a poem as a thankyou for the hospitality he receives, and "Two Acres" later becomes his best-known work. Hollinghurst, who began as a poet, clearly enjoys composing Cecil's poems for him, and also enjoys reversing the convention whereby a poet of modest means writes a homage to his better-off hosts. Building design, fountains, garden statuary, the provision of beef and beer: Alongside the vanity and indulgence of Brideshead, Jonson's Penshurst is a model of social responsibility: The blushing apricot and woolly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
And though thy walls be of the country stone, They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan: There's none, that dwell about them, wish them down; But all come in, the farmer, and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute The lord and lady, though they have no suit. These poems celebrate simple rural virtues as against the dubious pleasures of London and never mind that the hosts own a place there too. Satires on mean hosts or hubristic houses were less common but not unknown. As well as writing thankyou letters in verse, visiting poets sometimes had to sing for their supper. Edmund Gosse's biography of Swinburne describes the excitement Swinburne aroused when he arrived looking like Apollo at a country house party in