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The Weather Stations
2011 Whiting Writers' Award Winner
The debut collection of ten short stories from Ryan Call, including stories originally published in Keyhole, The Lifted Brow, Lo-Ball, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart and Web Conjunctions.
The debut collection of ten short stories from Ryan Call, including stories originally published in Keyhole, The Lifted Brow, Lo-Ball, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart and Web Conjunctions.
210 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
September 29, 2012
Ten beautifully written stories set in an alternate world where the personification of weather turns storms into Storms with a malevolent penchant for hunting down and wiping out frail humans.
Yes, the books have a sci-fi twist, but the reader never feels like the world inhabited is really that different from the one we live in. The imagery evokes our atavistic and often mystical attachment to violent weather. Call's writing is precise, at times almost reading like a meteorological textbook. His characters are us, living lives in a world where nature can be harnessed as a super weapon in a war of nations, used as a means of conveyance, or simply worshiped for its essential splendor.
This collection is a must for any fan of short fiction.
Yes, the books have a sci-fi twist, but the reader never feels like the world inhabited is really that different from the one we live in. The imagery evokes our atavistic and often mystical attachment to violent weather. Call's writing is precise, at times almost reading like a meteorological textbook. His characters are us, living lives in a world where nature can be harnessed as a super weapon in a war of nations, used as a means of conveyance, or simply worshiped for its essential splendor.
This collection is a must for any fan of short fiction.
January 14, 2011
When travel writer Alexander Frater wrote lovingly of his father’s fascination with weather, ‘he measured and recorded it, noting down items like precipitation, hours of sunshine and wind speed and direction,’ he might just as easily have been writing about Ryan Call. Call’s narrative consciousness chases clouds and storms the way paparazzi chase stars: not to quarry them but to worship them, ancient gods and goddesses that they are. In the story ‘My Scattering,’ a character asked to describe a storm cloud says, ‘I remember thinking I could nearly reach out and touch it, so low did it hang in the sky. It seemed to have come for me, selected me for the taking.’ In capacious tales of mythic scale, Call tends to the delicate yet sometimes brutal relationship between us and nature. The Weather Stations is a record of humans ravished by Olympian thunderheads and carried off to live among the clouds. As in the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, this art has a timeless shape, a pure adoration of archetype, and yet it also has compassion, wry humor and awe. There’s so much depth and precision in this debut collection that it reads like the culmination of a life’s work. What wonderful providence for us that it’s a beginning.
February 8, 2013
The sunshine and rainbows and sweet spring winds first:
This is one of the most imaginative set of shorts I've thus far stumbled upon. Call has supreme storytelling skill, his worlds at once fantastic and vividly imaginable, his stories simultaneously interesting, hopeful, and in many places: quite terrifying.
Which is to say the first six come highly recommended:
"How We Came to Live in the Sky"
"I Pilot My Bed Deep into the Night"
"Consider the Buzzard"
"Windswept"
"My Scattering"
"The Architect's Apprentice"
The next four stories?
"Anvil"
"The Walker Circulation"
"Age Hung Us Out to Dry"
"Our Latitude, Our Longitude"
Nowhere near the caliber and quality of the first six. Nowhere near as interesting or as developed. They felt hasty, unfinished, and while their central themes certainly fit the collection, the collection's strength as a whole remains severely diminished by them. Call would have done better letting them fall into a forlorn piece of sky, or harnessing them to the back of a strong west wind.
[Four stars because (there will be weather, always, yes, and) the first six stories are good enough for me to forget the last four.]
This is one of the most imaginative set of shorts I've thus far stumbled upon. Call has supreme storytelling skill, his worlds at once fantastic and vividly imaginable, his stories simultaneously interesting, hopeful, and in many places: quite terrifying.
Which is to say the first six come highly recommended:
"How We Came to Live in the Sky"
"I Pilot My Bed Deep into the Night"
"Consider the Buzzard"
"Windswept"
"My Scattering"
"The Architect's Apprentice"
The next four stories?
"Anvil"
"The Walker Circulation"
"Age Hung Us Out to Dry"
"Our Latitude, Our Longitude"
Nowhere near the caliber and quality of the first six. Nowhere near as interesting or as developed. They felt hasty, unfinished, and while their central themes certainly fit the collection, the collection's strength as a whole remains severely diminished by them. Call would have done better letting them fall into a forlorn piece of sky, or harnessing them to the back of a strong west wind.
[Four stars because (there will be weather, always, yes, and) the first six stories are good enough for me to forget the last four.]
February 20, 2013
Few finer collections have I read, and if the later stories fall short of expectation, it's only because Call's set the bar so high. "My Scattering" may be one of the horrific stories I've recently read, and yet it's hauntingly beautiful - some part of me wanted to see it in my dreams. If "Anvil" feels unfinished, perhaps it's only because the story immediately preceding, "The Architect's Apprentice," twists more surely than most stories would dare hope. To wit: you should probably read it.
[4.5 stars because even as the last few stories fall flat, I think they do so at least in part because our expectations as readers have lifted: the first six stories are astounding, breathtaking, flights of equal part whimsy and tragedy and altogether true, in as much as any fiction can be true. Did I mention you should probably read this?]
[4.5 stars because even as the last few stories fall flat, I think they do so at least in part because our expectations as readers have lifted: the first six stories are astounding, breathtaking, flights of equal part whimsy and tragedy and altogether true, in as much as any fiction can be true. Did I mention you should probably read this?]
July 2, 2013
If I have a complaint about this almost paralyzingly beautiful collection, it is that after I read part of it, I feel like there's nothing I can do afterwards that's enough, that has the appropriate weight, that is worthy of following the experience of reading it.
Ryan is actually a friend of mine, and I've been after him to write this book for a few years now, so I can't say that I'm not biased or deeply invested in the existence of this collection. That said, the extent to which his work (and this group of stories in particular) moves me cannot be overstated.
Ryan is actually a friend of mine, and I've been after him to write this book for a few years now, so I can't say that I'm not biased or deeply invested in the existence of this collection. That said, the extent to which his work (and this group of stories in particular) moves me cannot be overstated.
April 17, 2011
This is an intriguing story collection published by Caketrain, a Pittsburgh-based journal and press that always strikes me for in intriginess.
All of Call's stories take place in a fantastical world where the narrators and their associates battle against malevolent weather. It's a fictive creation in the mold of Calvino and Borges, and one story in particular, "The Walker Circulation," I think makes that comparison legitimate. The prose is fairly stark, matching the hopeless settings that dominate almost every story (in most of them, you are told right away that any current pleasantness is doomed to pass, usually to be replaced by utter devastation), but when Call lets the language turn poetic, there are a few really moving moments, usually at the end of stories, where they act as a reward for making it through the sometimes almost clinical (though enjoyable) voice of the narrators.
"The Walker Circulation" was my favorite story. I'm sure that I'll reread it and reference it. It deserves close attention from any reader.
All of Call's stories take place in a fantastical world where the narrators and their associates battle against malevolent weather. It's a fictive creation in the mold of Calvino and Borges, and one story in particular, "The Walker Circulation," I think makes that comparison legitimate. The prose is fairly stark, matching the hopeless settings that dominate almost every story (in most of them, you are told right away that any current pleasantness is doomed to pass, usually to be replaced by utter devastation), but when Call lets the language turn poetic, there are a few really moving moments, usually at the end of stories, where they act as a reward for making it through the sometimes almost clinical (though enjoyable) voice of the narrators.
"The Walker Circulation" was my favorite story. I'm sure that I'll reread it and reference it. It deserves close attention from any reader.
November 10, 2019
This book will be with me for a long time. The images that it evoked, the wonder and awe that the book left me with are hard to describe. It is stunningly well written. The stories are hard to detail and capture in a short review in such a way that will give them their due, trust me, just read them. You need to immerse yourself in them and sample their wonder yourself. A friend asked me to read one of the stories for a discussion group and after that one, I was hooked. I had to have more so downloaded the book. You'll never look at a thunderstorm the same again without a bit of magic returning.
January 18, 2012
sad stories of humans estranged from themselves and "the weather". unfortunately most of these stories are our rather dismal future ( without birds, they cannot live in a tornado anymore than we can live in a storm cave) so if you need to bone up for the future, here you go. plus, a more appropriate cover has rarely been matched with the content of a book, see "sleep elevations: by maia flore . caketrain appears to be the REAL THING.
http://www.maiaflore.com/personal/sle...
http://www.maiaflore.com/personal/sle...
July 14, 2019
Beautiful, strange, surreal, sometimes frightening, stories that are set in apocalyptic settings and situations due to the weather. My favorite stories were The Walker Circulation, and Consider the Buzzard.
April 7, 2018
My only quibble might be with how so many of the stories tend to conclude with a gesture of dissipation, but I was bowled over by these deft, imaginative, compassionate stories. Truly worth reading.
March 5, 2020
Wonderfully Strange
You might call this variations on a theme of weather. At times steampunk like, but also not at all. A bizarre way of seeing and thinking about life.
You might call this variations on a theme of weather. At times steampunk like, but also not at all. A bizarre way of seeing and thinking about life.
July 10, 2020
There are moments in which the air is a character -- stories like tumultuous, ethereal clouds.
July 2, 2012
It is an odd thing when one both feels aggravated by a book, and incredibly charmed and moved by it. Thus is the case with this book and me. I find the conceit of the book--that there is a world like our own, but different, in that somehow weather is not sentient, yet somehow always active, attacking, that it can be used and controlled (but not harnessed, fully) and that we live in the sky, at least part of the time. This is the basic premise of the book's stories--not connected in anything other than this conceit, and each using the weather angle differently enough that Mr. Call is not suggesting this is an alternate universe, a fully realized "world."
And this drove me crazy; magical realism is just something I've never been able to accept aesthetically for reasons I can't articulate.
But.
At first, as I began to journey into these stories, I felt like Call was using the conceit to give another liberal indictment of our contemporary cultural scene, focusing on environmental degradation. And this, I felt, would be yawn-inducing and reductive.
But.
Yes, two buts. Call uses magical realism, to be sure, and, to be sure, this did, and always will, not be my cup of aesthetic tea. Call, to be sure, did not make this into any blase, boring, and reductive set of "critique" stories. What he did was something much more compelling, something that showed what, in the hands of a real talent, with a nuanced intelligence, and a palpable sensitivity to human life and experience, can be done with such convoluted and broken-mirror presentations of reality: Call made the world we live in unstable, unfamiliar, and, in so doing, made it more truthful.
This is not, be sure, a collection of Dostoevsky-esque philosophical treatises residing within narratives. Rather, Call participated in that great, long tradition of the American short story, presenting the mundane and quotidian in ways that show them to be full of power, art, truth, and meaning. In our current moment, when family breakups, illness and its treatment, economic uncertainty, war and heroism, these things that are so much a part of our lives are so often repeated and analyzed and made invisible for their over-exposure in the media, made unimportant for the petty analysis we and our neighbors and our politicians and, regrettably, even our artists put forth, Call makes these things so unfamiliar, so new, so alive, that we can't help but face our experiences of these things anew, view them without the cold abstraction and logic and petty emotionality of politics and journalism.
No, Call makes us see these things as deeply, principally, and fully human. That's what he does in this book. The small-press-publishing, MFA-wielding hordes publish a lot of ironically-detached, overly-wrought hipster garbage. Ryan Call, and this volume, come out of this world and rise above it, showing us that a well-told, simple story can resonate, can make us see our world afresh, can make us understand our neighbors anew. This is what story-telling, when done well, has always done. And Call tells these stories well. Kudos also to Call for using the conceit, which I found eye-rolling at first, responsibly and compellingly, so as to produce a set of stories that drew me in, held me close, and made me look at them until I saw their unpronounceable, un-articulateable truths.
A very nice little book worth far more than its purchase price or the time you put into reading it.
And this drove me crazy; magical realism is just something I've never been able to accept aesthetically for reasons I can't articulate.
But.
At first, as I began to journey into these stories, I felt like Call was using the conceit to give another liberal indictment of our contemporary cultural scene, focusing on environmental degradation. And this, I felt, would be yawn-inducing and reductive.
But.
Yes, two buts. Call uses magical realism, to be sure, and, to be sure, this did, and always will, not be my cup of aesthetic tea. Call, to be sure, did not make this into any blase, boring, and reductive set of "critique" stories. What he did was something much more compelling, something that showed what, in the hands of a real talent, with a nuanced intelligence, and a palpable sensitivity to human life and experience, can be done with such convoluted and broken-mirror presentations of reality: Call made the world we live in unstable, unfamiliar, and, in so doing, made it more truthful.
This is not, be sure, a collection of Dostoevsky-esque philosophical treatises residing within narratives. Rather, Call participated in that great, long tradition of the American short story, presenting the mundane and quotidian in ways that show them to be full of power, art, truth, and meaning. In our current moment, when family breakups, illness and its treatment, economic uncertainty, war and heroism, these things that are so much a part of our lives are so often repeated and analyzed and made invisible for their over-exposure in the media, made unimportant for the petty analysis we and our neighbors and our politicians and, regrettably, even our artists put forth, Call makes these things so unfamiliar, so new, so alive, that we can't help but face our experiences of these things anew, view them without the cold abstraction and logic and petty emotionality of politics and journalism.
No, Call makes us see these things as deeply, principally, and fully human. That's what he does in this book. The small-press-publishing, MFA-wielding hordes publish a lot of ironically-detached, overly-wrought hipster garbage. Ryan Call, and this volume, come out of this world and rise above it, showing us that a well-told, simple story can resonate, can make us see our world afresh, can make us understand our neighbors anew. This is what story-telling, when done well, has always done. And Call tells these stories well. Kudos also to Call for using the conceit, which I found eye-rolling at first, responsibly and compellingly, so as to produce a set of stories that drew me in, held me close, and made me look at them until I saw their unpronounceable, un-articulateable truths.
A very nice little book worth far more than its purchase price or the time you put into reading it.
August 14, 2014
The Weather Stations Anyone who thinks weather is something boring and takes this every day phenomenon for granted, should read this book. I'm not joking. I, too, was skeptical when I bought the ebook copy, thinking there was only so much that one could write about the weather, but considering that this is an anthology of ten short stories I was intrigued to find out what exactly was inside.
True, the basic concept of weather remains the same and virtually unchanged throughout the whole book, but it's the way in which the remainder of the story is spun around the concept that was truly impressive. Notably, my favourite was the short story "The Walker Circulation", in which every single person is born with their own weather conditions (literally), and how a couple takes care of their baby who is born with dangerous weather conditions.
The stories are moving, unique, and, above all, have a very strong human quality to them. It's rare that I come across writing so honest, and so amazing in its straight forward-ness. It's simply written but gets across the ideas wonderfully. Yes, I didn't love absolutely EVERY story - some I think could've been worked on a little more, given some more meat because the basic bone structure is there - but this will definitely find its audience, and I really hope it does, because it's a rare gem that is not that well known, mainly perhaps because it's printed by a relatively small-scale press.
If you do come across this book, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It will really open the eyes to humanity's connection to the weather in a literal way, but also is very powerfully when some aspects are looked at allegorically. A wonderful read that is a mix of adventure and thought which triggers the reader emotionally in all the right places.
True, the basic concept of weather remains the same and virtually unchanged throughout the whole book, but it's the way in which the remainder of the story is spun around the concept that was truly impressive. Notably, my favourite was the short story "The Walker Circulation", in which every single person is born with their own weather conditions (literally), and how a couple takes care of their baby who is born with dangerous weather conditions.
The stories are moving, unique, and, above all, have a very strong human quality to them. It's rare that I come across writing so honest, and so amazing in its straight forward-ness. It's simply written but gets across the ideas wonderfully. Yes, I didn't love absolutely EVERY story - some I think could've been worked on a little more, given some more meat because the basic bone structure is there - but this will definitely find its audience, and I really hope it does, because it's a rare gem that is not that well known, mainly perhaps because it's printed by a relatively small-scale press.
If you do come across this book, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It will really open the eyes to humanity's connection to the weather in a literal way, but also is very powerfully when some aspects are looked at allegorically. A wonderful read that is a mix of adventure and thought which triggers the reader emotionally in all the right places.
February 26, 2017
This collection of stories has captured my thoughts in a way that will haunt me for a long time. I've already tried to describe it to a handful of people to tie into some half-expressed moment in conversation. His world is startling and imaginative but delicately human. Of course, I am among those who are always aware of weather.
It took me a bit to get into the rhythm of his story-telling, but it was worth continuing. Very glad I own a copy I can return to whenever I want.
It took me a bit to get into the rhythm of his story-telling, but it was worth continuing. Very glad I own a copy I can return to whenever I want.
Read
October 18, 2011In Season Six of Doctor Who, one of the most highly anticipated episodes was written by Neil Gaiman, the author known for his Sandman series along with his novels like American Gods and Coraline. In this episode, the Doctor and his companions Amy and Rory crash land on an asteroid in an alternate universe. During this episode, we learn that the asteroid is a sentient planet that has trapped the soul of the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space, or the blue police box that is a time machine) in a woman.
This is a perfect example of what Gaiman does so well: personify an abstract concept, such as Death, Desire, and Dream in Sandman and media and celebrity in American Gods. Of course, this only works if an author can figure out what makes an abstract concept human. In the case of the TARDIS, we see her child-like acquisition of language and her relationship with the doctor, one that quickly resembles an old married couple who bicker about which way the TARDIS’s door opens and who stole whom. We can also see how a time machine has trouble inhabiting a body that experiences time in a linear fashion, as she constantly references things that will happen in the future. (Her first words are goodbye and her last are hello.)
Read the rest at the site...
http://emprisereview.com/2011/reviews...
This is a perfect example of what Gaiman does so well: personify an abstract concept, such as Death, Desire, and Dream in Sandman and media and celebrity in American Gods. Of course, this only works if an author can figure out what makes an abstract concept human. In the case of the TARDIS, we see her child-like acquisition of language and her relationship with the doctor, one that quickly resembles an old married couple who bicker about which way the TARDIS’s door opens and who stole whom. We can also see how a time machine has trouble inhabiting a body that experiences time in a linear fashion, as she constantly references things that will happen in the future. (Her first words are goodbye and her last are hello.)
Read the rest at the site...
http://emprisereview.com/2011/reviews...
April 6, 2011
This is a special book. The Weather Stations made me feel sweet inside, sometimes sad, like visiting a series of miniature towns inside a snowglobe. For each of its dystopian weather events, I got the feeling that there was a larger benevolent hand at work--cradling it all. These are the humans doing the best they can with what they have. This is the beating heart within the doppler. This is apocalypse light.
May 9, 2013
Stories about the weather. A man possessed by lightening, a child whose personal climate leads to an early death, a father carried away by the clouds, people falling through shards of sky that had collapsed to the ground, the militarization of winds, and a number of other bizarre tales which, despite their surreality, manage to get right to the heart of the strongest human emotions. I absolutely recommend this book. A hundred times recommend.
August 10, 2024
I didn't really have any expectations from this, I just wanted a cheap and short collection of stories to download on my phone because I was bored at work and failed to bring a book with me
But damn, I really enjoyed this. I'll definitely look for more things by this author
Update: Nearly three years later, I just started rereading this and damn... 50 pages in and I just want to curl up and cry (in a good way)
But damn, I really enjoyed this. I'll definitely look for more things by this author
Update: Nearly three years later, I just started rereading this and damn... 50 pages in and I just want to curl up and cry (in a good way)
January 11, 2012
From the very first sentence I knew this was going to be a keeper, and Ryan Call did not disappoint. The prose is lyrical and haunting and and vivid and, not to be completely over the top, awe-inspiring. In most short collections there's always a dud or two, but not here. I rarely read books more than once as life is too short, but I'll definitely revisit this one.
August 16, 2023
I read this years ago and wrote a review on another page. Since I loved it so much, I wanted to share it here:
Wow! The Weather Stations by Ryan Call is a wonderfully weird book of short stories about weather. It's not your mother's weather, but fantastical clouds and wind that are just as much a character as the people.
Wow! The Weather Stations by Ryan Call is a wonderfully weird book of short stories about weather. It's not your mother's weather, but fantastical clouds and wind that are just as much a character as the people.
December 6, 2013
Powerful prose that takes the reader through an imaginative cumulus terrain. The delicacy and harshness of the landscape creates an interesting juxtaposition that helps illustrate the fragility of existence which characterizes Call's work.
July 7, 2011
I just wrote a print-type review for this. Who should I send it to?
September 25, 2011
my review of this lovely wonder: http://www.redfez.net/nonfiction/313
April 3, 2011
Doubly amazing, both for dense weather imagery without repetition or boredom, and for having a deep sense of his characters with little to no dialogue.
Want to read
November 12, 2011Where can I buy this in Seattle?
July 6, 2012
Loved the ideas, but thought the writing and overall execution could be tighter.
July 30, 2012
I read this about a year ago and images from the work will pop into my head.
Read
September 14, 2012An alternate world, heavy with description. Living in the clouds might not be as fun as you think.
Want to read
September 10, 2012from publisher
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews