Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully written debut stories!!!
Review: I really enjoyed these 11 stories. Most of these stories are about childhood, growing up, and becoming mature adults. A lot of these stories will make you look back on your own life growing up as a child and all the experiences that that can entail. The author's sentences are thoughtfully written and in a very stylistic way. I was unhappy to see the book end, especially after reading the very emotional last story "Come Live with Me and Be My Love", about a middle-age man looking back on his 30 year arranged marriage. This was a truly touching story. I recommend this very human collection of stories. A great debut collection from Mr. Greer. I just hope there is more to come soon. He has a great elegant and poetic style of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written debut stories!!!
Review: I really enjoyed these 11 stories. Most of these stories are about childhood, growing up, and becoming mature adults. A lot of these stories will make you look back on your own life growing up as a child and all the experiences that that can entail. The author's sentences are thoughtfully written and in a very stylistic way. I was unhappy to see the book end, especially after reading the very emotional last story "Come Live with Me and Be My Love", about a middle-age man looking back on his 30 year arranged marriage. This was a truly touching story. I recommend this very human collection of stories. A great debut collection from Mr. Greer. I just hope there is more to come soon. He has a great elegant and poetic style of writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical, lush, mysterious, wonderful
Review: I really hate to use this word, since it's been permanently maimed for the language by the maudlin, sentimental and religious/spiritually superficial, but it describes Mr. Greer's book as a whole: ineffable. There is something unnamed (unnamable?), mysterious, huge and exciting quietly spiking through the well-positioned chinks in narrative. People in this book plot and work in interesting ways to circumvent the mundane while this ineffable...thing...swirls constantly in and out and all around. This is a very well done collection of stories. I heartily agree that Mr. Greer's writing borders on the very best poetry, reminding me somewhat of Seamus Heaney: lyrical and lush and mysterious.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical, lush, mysterious, wonderful
Review: I really hate to use this word, since it's been permanently maimed for the language by the maudlin, sentimental and religious/spiritually superficial, but it describes Mr. Greer's book as a whole: ineffable. There is something unnamed (unnamable?), mysterious, huge and exciting quietly spiking through the well-positioned chinks in narrative. People in this book plot and work in interesting ways to circumvent the mundane while this ineffable...thing...swirls constantly in and out and all around. This is a very well done collection of stories. I heartily agree that Mr. Greer's writing borders on the very best poetry, reminding me somewhat of Seamus Heaney: lyrical and lush and mysterious.
Rating:
Summary: "How It Was For Me"
Review: Immensely great book to read, this author is a winner.
Rating:
Summary: Luminous
Review: Mr. Greer's book, "How it Was for Me," is delightful. Greer writes well, his prose has a curious luminosity, and he has a remarkable eye for those key details that make a story successful. His characters are complex and interesting, their arcs always surprising and always revealing, their conflicts never tidily resolved in that self-help way found in mediocre fiction. In these stories, Greer tackles the different faces of longing. There's love, which Greer portrays as wistful, quiet, and companionable, and belonging to the realm of women. And then there's sexual desire, which is as sharp, painful, and fleeting as a flame. Desire belongs to men, and for men, in Greer's fiction. My favorite story by far is "Lost Causes," and that's probably because I heard him read it in Missoula, Montana. If I have to find a flaw in the book's, it's the way Greer spins his plots. Sort of mushy, vague, and overly pretty, the kind of plots typically churned out by graduates of creative writing programs. That said, I can't wait for his novel.
Rating:
Summary: Luminous
Review: Mr. Greer's book, "How it Was for Me," is delightful. Greer writes well, his prose has a curious luminosity, and he has a remarkable eye for those key details that make a story successful. His characters are complex and interesting, their arcs always surprising and always revealing, their conflicts never tidily resolved in that self-help way found in mediocre fiction. In these stories, Greer tackles the different faces of longing. There's love, which Greer portrays as wistful, quiet, and companionable, and belonging to the realm of women. And then there's sexual desire, which is as sharp, painful, and fleeting as a flame. Desire belongs to men, and for men, in Greer's fiction. My favorite story by far is "Lost Causes," and that's probably because I heard him read it in Missoula, Montana. If I have to find a flaw in the book's, it's the way Greer spins his plots. Sort of mushy, vague, and overly pretty, the kind of plots typically churned out by graduates of creative writing programs. That said, I can't wait for his novel.
Rating:
Summary: Poetic and touching
Review: Really beautiful. Each story is so great, and all so different. I really recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Magic
Review: Really fine fiction is like music in that its delivery is a delight, and its crescendo is both expected and startling. Really fine fiction is magical in its ability to recount a history and yet transcend the very notion of permanence and event. Andrew Sean Greer's stories are startling and beautiful, musical and magical. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: magnanimous
Review: These stories are some of the finest I've read in years. I bought the book because I remembered a story Greer had published in Esquire a few years ago about twin boys that was brilliant. I was happy to see that that story is just one of a whole collection of phenomenal stories. Greer's ability to mine the complexities of human interaction and the lonliness and longing of childhood is masterful. I had the strong premonition reading these stories that Greer will go on to be an important writer; one who will have an impact on literature in the way that James or, more currently, Michael Cunningham or Howard Norman, has. Not only does he have an uncanny ability to translate very specific worlds, whether that be the middle-aged, opera-going upperclasses of the South, or the adolescent backyards of suburban Washington, but his concerns with the barriers of class, age, gender and sexuality all elevate these stories out of the category of merely good or accomplished, they are brilliant. There is a story at the end of the collection titled "Come Live With Me and Be My Love" that is simply one of the best stories I have ever read. I cannot recommend this book more strongly.
|
