Rating: 
Summary: Good stuff
Review: I bought this book because I thought it would be about music. The stories were mostly about sex, though, but weren't really sleazy or cheap--very well written and even moving. Really good. I'd buy his next one, for sure.
Rating:
Summary: a celebration of the goddess in women
Review: I don't have anything terribly original or different to add to the other highly laudatory (and rightly so) reader reviews. What struck me as so very lovely and real about the stories was the acknowledgement by Mr. Almond of the capacity of some women to enthrall and mystify some men. Almond's women have mature bodies, sexual needs, and great capacity. While his men can't hold on to them, they are, at least, left with the memories of time spent with someone extraordinary.It took me over three weeks to finish the stories as I did exactly what a previous reviewer advised: I took my sweet time.
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Summary: I didn't know short stories could be this much fun.
Review: I don't usually like reading short stories (I borrowed the book from a friend) but the stories in this collection were so entertaining and so easy to get into, I was really surprised and pleased. Some of them made me laugh out loud, and in all of them I found things I could relate to about relationships and sex. I definitely would recommend it to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: stud goes a-writin'
Review: I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Almond read from his book of short stories. He read "Among the Ik". The story was so well-crafted that I had to buy a copy of the book from him on the spot (no middle-man, sorry Amazon). I read the book that weekend and my favorites are "Moscow" and "How to Love a Republican". There is a theme throughout all the stories and that is the balance between romantic,(...) love and friendship. Or in the case of "Among the Ik", the balance of finding that love of your life and still letting the world in. I highly recommend this book. The stories are sensual and the characters are real and the writing is brutally honest.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Almond read from his book of short stories. He read "Among the Ik". The story was so well-crafted that I had to buy a copy of the book from him on the spot (no middle-man, sorry Amazon). I read the book that weekend and my favorites are "Moscow" and "How to Love a Republican". There is a theme throughout all the stories and that is the balance between romantic,(...) love and friendship. Or in the case of "Among the Ik", the balance of finding that love of your life and still letting the world in. I highly recommend this book. The stories are sensual and the characters are real and the writing is brutally honest.
Rating:
Summary: For those who hate books, you might just love this one.
Review: I will be the first to admit, i hate books and reading, for the most part. Sure, i enjoyed catcher in the rye, the same book that every person, or at least every teenager, loves. But "My Life in Heavy Metal" became the first book that i ever bought, solely for my own enjoyment. Introduced to me through a college freshman writing class was the short story "How to Be a Republican," one of a collection of short stories in this book by Steve Almond. "How to be a Republican" is one of my favorite of the stories i have read so far from the collection, but i have not yet read them all. In all of the stories, the main character is Dave (Steve Almond) who is fighting between different forces of love (friendship, romance, and sex). These stories take you in with them. You become emotionally attached to characters, esp. Dave, wanting to help him all the time. The stories are very real, and sometimes graphic with their sensual imagery...il finish this later
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Combination
Review: I'm warming up to collections of short stories as time goes on. My Life in Heavy Metal is one of the better collections I have read this year (probably second only to Haslett's You Are Not A Stranger Here). Though provocatively written (and certainly sexually so) you can easily digest these stories. There is almost a lyrical quality about them, even though the words kind of snap at you. Read a sample here at Amazon and see how easily you are taken in. Worth buying - you'll likely give it two or three reads.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Combination
Review: I'm warming up to collections of short stories as time goes on. My Life in Heavy Metal is one of the better collections I have read this year (probably second only to Haslett's You Are Not A Stranger Here). Though provocatively written (and certainly sexually so) you can easily digest these stories. There is almost a lyrical quality about them, even though the words kind of snap at you. Read a sample here at Amazon and see how easily you are taken in. Worth buying - you'll likely give it two or three reads.
Rating:
Summary: Great professor, too!
Review: I've only gotten the chance to read a few of the stories in the book, but they were all very entertaining and I keep intending to buy the whole book! I also had Steve Almond as a writing professor a year ago in college, he's a great guy and professor - one of the classes I probably enjoyed and benefitted the most from! I think I only missed one class - which for a 3 PM twice a week class is saying a lot ;-)
Rating:
Summary: "My Life in Heavy Metal"
Review: My Life in Heavy Metal is a wonderful first book of short stories, so funny in places that it is easy to miss what is serious, disturbing and funny about it. It is a tremendously bawdy book, and its humor--for instance when the narrator of "How to Love a Republican" speculates on why Republican men shun cunnilingus--is wild and bawdy. But the humor in these pieces is more often than not a sad humor, its narrators essentially unforgiving of themselves. More often than not, Almond seems to suggest, sex is the hard place where the ego splinters and fragments and after which the ego rejoins, battered but tragically reinforced. The stories vary in tone. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is one of two or three stories that essentially borrow their structure from romantic comedies. In deed, one could imagine some smart producer optioning them. The short shorts in this collection--"Moscow" and "The Law of Honey"--are lyrical celebrations of the force of desire and the goodness of desire. These are brief lyrics that celebrate the pursuit and not consummation as part of our noblest aspirations. Almond is attracted to an earthy dream of eastern Europe that we might get from the poems of Simic or Milosz as a sort of pure imaginative territory of smoked meat, pickled fish, and cabbage, a smoke-filled alternative to the disembodied health of snowboarders and their ilk. "The Last Single Days of Don Victor Potapenko" has some of the mouthy chutzpah of Babel's Jewish gangster stories like "How It Was Done In Kiev." Almond's natural story telling terrain is the culture of young, intensely ambitious and narcissistic educated professionals. Ambition, narcissism: how much of America does that cover? One wonders if Almond, a former journalist, chose to move to Boston to examine the specimens that he needed to tell his stories. There is a certain amount of sociological comedy in his tales of life on the edges of college campuses. His story "The Pass" simultaneously tells the story of people making passes at each other: two gay soldiers at a night club in German, two middle aged business people in an airport, a couple having a possibly romantic dinner in an apartment, and best of all, some sort of software schnook at an apartment party in what sounds like Cambridge. There is some fantasia, some of his Eastern European wit in his well imagined German nightclub. But his bread and butter egotists are sitting down to sup and drank somewhere between Harvard and Tufts. Some of the stories in the collection are linked narratives, a sort of Rake's Progress, about a character named David, an aspiring writer with a disastrous love life. The first of these is "My Life in Heavy Metal" is set in Texas where David whom we meet as a young journalist carrying on an affair with a lifeguard while living with his ideal girlfriend from college. This is a story about the disastrous effects of infidelity, a story of sexual shame. A third story deals with the same character a few years later, conducting an affair with a Polish woman and then, no longer content with a long distance relationship, attempting to live with her and her mother in a small industrial town in Poland, a living situation that ends in disaster and shame. The third story "Bodies in Extremis" finds this character trying to jumpstart a teaching career and having a casual relationship with a younger woman-- a deeply unappealing and ambitious conformist--that becomes, as the two characters rehearse their own narcissism, disturbing--disturbing for its intensity and failure to result in love. Later on, the young woman seems to punish David with a disturbing gesture--arranging for him to walk into a room where she has just had sex with somebody else-- only David can not be sure what she has intended. Sex in each of these stories becomes increasingly disturbing, more--from a certain point of view, if you are the kind of person who keeps score--accomplished, but less rewarding, more draining and damaging. "Bodies in Extremis" is in some ways suggestive of Frank Bidart's grand poems about erotic life in their sense of trouble and heartache. However, Almond's sense of the erotic life being linked to the ambitions of the ego marks him as his own sort of moralist. It is this dark sensibility that unifies even the happier and romantically plotted stories in Almond's collection.
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