Mr. Agreeable

by Kirk Nesset

Mr. Agreeable is a collection of flash and sudden fictions, featuring keyhole glimpses of lives at the edge, of characters haunted by shadowy pasts, caught at pivotal moments and braced for what lies ahead. Burdened and bent in their various ways, Nesset's figures are led forward by others by strangers, assailants, ambiguous friends and and are finally nudged toward awareness or tentative insight, if not moved to action. Gathered together, the stories comprise a twisted collage, sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling, often hilariously unsettling. Stories from Mr. Agreeable have been anthologized widely, appearing in The Pushcart Best of the Small Presses, in Norton's Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction, and elsewhere.

98 pages, Paperback

Published September 21, 2009

About the author

Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Paradise Road and Mr. Agreeable, as well as a book of poems, Saint X, a book of translations, Alphabet of the World, and a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver. His new work in translation is forthcoming: Disappearances, Selected Stories by Edmundo Paz Soldan. Nesset's stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Iowa Review, Agni, Crazyhorse, The Sun, Fiction, Witness and Prairie Schooner, among others. His short short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton's New Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.

He grew up in northern California and studied at UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara, as well as abroad. He has taught at Whittier College, Allegheny College and the University of California, and served many summers as writer in residence at Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany).

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minimalist fiction writer, Kirk Nesset, explores the brevity of people and relationships in this short story collection. It would be almost too easy to compare Nesset to Raymond Carver, but I will anyways. The people found in this collection could be your family members, your neighbors, and maybe even you. My favorite story, "Snakes Having Babies" details a single summer of a family's breaking point, with an outbreak of snakes in their country home. This is the first book I have read by Kirk Nesset -- and I know I will go out and seek more.

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

the second fine collection of short fiction i've read from this western PA-based writer. this one expands the subject matter beyond the small-town lives that were the focus of his previous collection. More importantly, on a formal level Nesset is working here almost exclusively in the short-short format, with few stories more than a few pages each. he does it well.