The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel is a compilation of all Hempel's short stories published between 1985 and 2005. The collection was published by Scribner in 2006 with an introduction by Rick Moody. The book was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006. Read more - Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia on Amazon
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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. (May)
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Lisa ist reif für die Insel, als sie erfährt, dass ihr Mann Leo sie nach siebzehn Jahren Ehe wegen einer Jüngeren verlassen will. Unterstützung bekommt sie ausgerechnet von ihrer Schwiegermutter Marie, die sie zu einem spontanen Urlaub auf Mallorca überredet. Nach anfänglichem Zögern stimmt Lisa zu und landet mit Marie bei deren Freundin Lore, in einem wahrlich verrückten Rentnerhotel. Sollte Lisa von Ruhe und Erholung geträumt haben: Fehlanzeige! Und — niemals hätte sie damit gerechnet, ausgerechnet in diesem chaotischen Urlaub ihrem Traummann zu begegnen. Aber als die Schmetterlinge in ihrem Bauch erst einmal zu tanzen beginnen, gibt es kein Zurück mehr…