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Everything Is Broken
The stories here document the way we live our days now, very often alone and in dire straits. The stories were chosen for their beguiling voices, their vivid sense of places, their compelling and intriguing characters, their tension, and their suspense. These are stories about what keeps us up at night. Important stories. The subjects are as splendid as they are varied: a talented young swimmer longs for a family and for love as he swims against his arch-rival; a young grocery worker/rock guitarist finds himself lured into a fundamentalist church by a—what else?—beautiful woman; two lonely souls drift through the city streets hoping for intimacy and settling for diversion; a group of old friends, retired fire fighters, honor a dead colleague, a suicide, and face the extermination of their own dreams; the quirky wife of a rising political star suffers a breakdown on the eve of the gubernatorial election; an athletically gifted high school student escapes her wealthy adoptive parents in search of the life, the culture, and the family she was taken from.
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 2, 2013
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February 2, 2014Because I have a short story in this anthology I won't rate it. I'll leave that to others.
Editor John Dufresne did a terrific job in choosing the stories and in essence the theme of the book - Everything Is Broken.
Putting aside my story (for the same reason as mentioned above), I will contain my review to the other stories. In a word, they're wonderful. They take me -- the reader -- to places as diverse as the slums of New York, the working class streets of Chicago, a politcal gathering in Kentucky, an evangelical church in southeast Massachusetts, and a 1963 Junior Olympic swimming pool in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Still, it isn't the locations that clinch the deal and make these stories so compelling, it's the struggles that each protagonist faces. The authors aren't afraid to expose their characters to difficulties, and even less afraid to have the charactes face themselves--sometimes to the benefit of that person and other times not. Each of the six stories runs 12-18 pages and the book itself is 109 pages. Though the theme and book title may be Everything Is Broken, the stories themselves are anything but.
Editor John Dufresne did a terrific job in choosing the stories and in essence the theme of the book - Everything Is Broken.
Putting aside my story (for the same reason as mentioned above), I will contain my review to the other stories. In a word, they're wonderful. They take me -- the reader -- to places as diverse as the slums of New York, the working class streets of Chicago, a politcal gathering in Kentucky, an evangelical church in southeast Massachusetts, and a 1963 Junior Olympic swimming pool in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Still, it isn't the locations that clinch the deal and make these stories so compelling, it's the struggles that each protagonist faces. The authors aren't afraid to expose their characters to difficulties, and even less afraid to have the charactes face themselves--sometimes to the benefit of that person and other times not. Each of the six stories runs 12-18 pages and the book itself is 109 pages. Though the theme and book title may be Everything Is Broken, the stories themselves are anything but.
Displaying 1 of 1 review