What do you think?
Rate this book
With or Without: Literary Fiction Finding Humor and Unexpected Beauty in Life's Quirky, Everyday Moments
Set in family homes, factories, shops, small-town streets, backyards-the familiar landscapes of our everyday lives-these stories take us by surprise as they plumb the complex and often tenuous connections that exist between child and parent, husband and wife, friend and friend, the individual and his own
- The unwitting jinx at a garbage collection company-accidents happen around him, not to him-avoids becoming the company pariah when he’s shown a way to make his “powers” work to everyone’s advantage…
- A man taught by his father’s example to disdain work, and who married into a family obsessed with it (his sever brothers-in-law, carpenters, built his house while he passed out the beers), may have found his calling at last-in sophisticated self-amusement…
- On a picket line-across months of long, cold nights-a man and a woman are drawn together by a shared desperate optimism and by the scent of the woman’s perfume…
- The game of Risk played habitually-obsessively-by a group of friends becomes a strangely unsettling reflection of their own tangled lives…
- Facing a middle age and a growing sense of emptiness, a man convinces himself that his dead friend-whose life he always envied, whose approval would validate his own life-has never died…
- When his teacher, and then his parents, dub him a “goof,” a young boy hesitantly unveils graphic proof that he’s already mastered his father’s dream of being an artist…
In each of the ten stories, Charles Dickinson puts a spin on the ordinary. It is the pleasure of these stories that they enable us to see what would perhaps otherwise remain humor in the most mundane situation, eloquence in a simple human gesture, the quirky, telling, sometimes ennobling moments in the day-to-dayness of life.
- The unwitting jinx at a garbage collection company-accidents happen around him, not to him-avoids becoming the company pariah when he’s shown a way to make his “powers” work to everyone’s advantage…
- A man taught by his father’s example to disdain work, and who married into a family obsessed with it (his sever brothers-in-law, carpenters, built his house while he passed out the beers), may have found his calling at last-in sophisticated self-amusement…
- On a picket line-across months of long, cold nights-a man and a woman are drawn together by a shared desperate optimism and by the scent of the woman’s perfume…
- The game of Risk played habitually-obsessively-by a group of friends becomes a strangely unsettling reflection of their own tangled lives…
- Facing a middle age and a growing sense of emptiness, a man convinces himself that his dead friend-whose life he always envied, whose approval would validate his own life-has never died…
- When his teacher, and then his parents, dub him a “goof,” a young boy hesitantly unveils graphic proof that he’s already mastered his father’s dream of being an artist…
In each of the ten stories, Charles Dickinson puts a spin on the ordinary. It is the pleasure of these stories that they enable us to see what would perhaps otherwise remain humor in the most mundane situation, eloquence in a simple human gesture, the quirky, telling, sometimes ennobling moments in the day-to-dayness of life.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1987
2 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
Charles Dickinson
25 books16 followersCharles Dickinson is an American writer known for his literary novels that mix heartbreak and humor with action and well-developed characters. His books include, in the order of their publication: Waltz in Marathon, Crows, With or Without (a short story collection), The Widows' Adventures, Rumor Has It, A Shortcut in Time, and its sequel, A Family in Time. His short stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and The New Yorker.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 19, 2024
“Arcadia”: 2 stars
- There's a rhythm to Dickinson's stories, and it's usually in the low BPMs. Yet, when it works within that soporific mode (as in the next story), then there's a little everyday half-magic that can accrue, even if often against the story's own better judgment. That's not the case here. The workaday-ness of the thing falls flat, on account of a stupid conceit taken to stupid extremes (our protagonist's inability to understand the words of both a fellow blue-collar colleague AND his whole family, as well; and we're given no reason to place this [not deep rural roots or even immigrant background] other than just 'so it goes'). STORY: those two guys, one mumbly but charming and the other lucid but a dud, connect, esp. once the latter drives the former home and sees his family.
“Sofa Art”: 3 stars
- Saccharine enough that I at first doubted the sincerity of the sugary tones. But it's there, and it ultimately works, in its easy, people-forgiving depiction of a family and a good-natured kid. STORY: father works too late and can't help motivate son at school. Son picks up the effort on Russia map project.
“My Livelihood”: 3 stars
- A sorry excuse for a working-class narrative (although, to his credit, it’s not Dickinson imposing that reading on the story), even if nicely illustrative of its time and therefore indicative of the type of atomized individual ennui within proscribed capitalist industry seen in other end-of-century mopers like American Beauty — which, likewise, employs largely privileged protagonists to make its asocial arguments, in essence deracinating anti-capitalism from its collectivist roots and stealing its valor for the jaded middle classes. In short, individual man is lone hero standing against destructive forces of work rather than the system. When the liberal breaks, in other words. STORY: man gets laid off from dairy job and settles into layabout golf hustling, even with bun in the oven and good carpentry opportunities from brothers-in-law he has contempt for.
“Bill Boston”: 3 stars
- Dickinson does not reach for the profound — a good thing, as he likely wouldn’t be able to touch it. His stories flow, with a C-Grade Yates-ian elegiac detachment, and that’s nothing to bemoan. His sad-sack protagonists are a welcome, to me, change of pace, if nonetheless in lockstep rhythm with the trends of his own time. That dejection is, however, itself a bit queer in most of the stories I’ve so far read, as both are much more products of success than anything else — a real and true existing dejection, but one less convincing the more it is used (a ploy more rickety the more it is leaned on). STORY: a mediocre middle aged man — doing the things of 80s white male self-diagnosed mediocrity (stable job, stable marriage, stable mortgage) — obsesses over the life and (possible) death of sometime friend and local Smart Jock Bill Boston, seeing him walking around years after his death, although of course it’s not him.
“Risk”: 4 stars
- A not unsuccessful framing structure for a story — friends in their thirties getting together for their monthly game of all-out Risk — but one that Dickinson can’t, despite some admirable effort, fully divorce from the ridiculousness of the gesture, esp. bc of the intricacy with which the game’s strategy and progress is described. It is, in other words, not the basketball in Love and Basketball, but the basketball in Space Jam. And, against my better instincts, the story worked on me — more for being so fully a little crystallized coprolite of its time, a bit of domestic unbliss as smooth as smooth can be, than for any more pertinent reason, esp. of the literary variety (although, to its credit, it glides along smooth enough, with a nice paragraph here and there [the paragraph with Owen and Eileen fucking most among them], although nothing that conveys more than story). A St. Elmo’s Fire of the page — something that surely exists, but not so much to me. STORY: this one is sleeping with that one, which we know about, and that one is sleeping with this one, which we do not know about until the end.
- There's a rhythm to Dickinson's stories, and it's usually in the low BPMs. Yet, when it works within that soporific mode (as in the next story), then there's a little everyday half-magic that can accrue, even if often against the story's own better judgment. That's not the case here. The workaday-ness of the thing falls flat, on account of a stupid conceit taken to stupid extremes (our protagonist's inability to understand the words of both a fellow blue-collar colleague AND his whole family, as well; and we're given no reason to place this [not deep rural roots or even immigrant background] other than just 'so it goes'). STORY: those two guys, one mumbly but charming and the other lucid but a dud, connect, esp. once the latter drives the former home and sees his family.
“Sofa Art”: 3 stars
- Saccharine enough that I at first doubted the sincerity of the sugary tones. But it's there, and it ultimately works, in its easy, people-forgiving depiction of a family and a good-natured kid. STORY: father works too late and can't help motivate son at school. Son picks up the effort on Russia map project.
“My Livelihood”: 3 stars
- A sorry excuse for a working-class narrative (although, to his credit, it’s not Dickinson imposing that reading on the story), even if nicely illustrative of its time and therefore indicative of the type of atomized individual ennui within proscribed capitalist industry seen in other end-of-century mopers like American Beauty — which, likewise, employs largely privileged protagonists to make its asocial arguments, in essence deracinating anti-capitalism from its collectivist roots and stealing its valor for the jaded middle classes. In short, individual man is lone hero standing against destructive forces of work rather than the system. When the liberal breaks, in other words. STORY: man gets laid off from dairy job and settles into layabout golf hustling, even with bun in the oven and good carpentry opportunities from brothers-in-law he has contempt for.
“Bill Boston”: 3 stars
- Dickinson does not reach for the profound — a good thing, as he likely wouldn’t be able to touch it. His stories flow, with a C-Grade Yates-ian elegiac detachment, and that’s nothing to bemoan. His sad-sack protagonists are a welcome, to me, change of pace, if nonetheless in lockstep rhythm with the trends of his own time. That dejection is, however, itself a bit queer in most of the stories I’ve so far read, as both are much more products of success than anything else — a real and true existing dejection, but one less convincing the more it is used (a ploy more rickety the more it is leaned on). STORY: a mediocre middle aged man — doing the things of 80s white male self-diagnosed mediocrity (stable job, stable marriage, stable mortgage) — obsesses over the life and (possible) death of sometime friend and local Smart Jock Bill Boston, seeing him walking around years after his death, although of course it’s not him.
“Risk”: 4 stars
- A not unsuccessful framing structure for a story — friends in their thirties getting together for their monthly game of all-out Risk — but one that Dickinson can’t, despite some admirable effort, fully divorce from the ridiculousness of the gesture, esp. bc of the intricacy with which the game’s strategy and progress is described. It is, in other words, not the basketball in Love and Basketball, but the basketball in Space Jam. And, against my better instincts, the story worked on me — more for being so fully a little crystallized coprolite of its time, a bit of domestic unbliss as smooth as smooth can be, than for any more pertinent reason, esp. of the literary variety (although, to its credit, it glides along smooth enough, with a nice paragraph here and there [the paragraph with Owen and Eileen fucking most among them], although nothing that conveys more than story). A St. Elmo’s Fire of the page — something that surely exists, but not so much to me. STORY: this one is sleeping with that one, which we know about, and that one is sleeping with this one, which we do not know about until the end.
December 23, 2023
3.5 Stars
July 3, 2007
Wonderful book of stories--fast, vivid, and smart about the ways and lengths people go to avoid work and each other. I've read this at least six times, and the world will be a better place if you read it, too.
Read
November 21, 2009Signed copy from Meghann Dellinger to Jonathan
April 8, 2018
Great short stories, good variety. The last story, and the title of the collection,has a great great ending.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews