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A Near-Perfect Gift
"[Kinder] writes with the x-ray vision of a Sherwood Anderson, and with the insight of a Freudian analyst, an interpreter of dreams, in language that could be as well suited to the traditional folktale or the hometown newspaper as to poetry of the French surrealists. Here is a collection of short fiction for our a mirror held up to the homely details, reflecting back to us the wild insides."
---Laura Kasischke, MLFA judge
"I read A Near-Perfect Gift from start to end without stopping, and, when I finished, found myself sitting in my darkened office, infused with an unexpected sense of peace."
---Eileen Pollack, MLFA judge
The stories in A Near-Perfect Gift revolve around the often hardscrabble small-town life in one rural village. Like any other community inhabited by the human race, it's a place where the banal and the improbable coalesce, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon some howl at the moon, while others turn out to be heroes. There are the two old ladies down the street who might be witches and must be exorcised, and the man who plucks chickens for a living. It is within the perimeter of this offbeat microcosm of the world that seemingly small questions---often the kind that children ask, arising from a child's imagined understanding of how the adult world works---assume an eerie Was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to surprise.
---Laura Kasischke, MLFA judge
"I read A Near-Perfect Gift from start to end without stopping, and, when I finished, found myself sitting in my darkened office, infused with an unexpected sense of peace."
---Eileen Pollack, MLFA judge
The stories in A Near-Perfect Gift revolve around the often hardscrabble small-town life in one rural village. Like any other community inhabited by the human race, it's a place where the banal and the improbable coalesce, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon some howl at the moon, while others turn out to be heroes. There are the two old ladies down the street who might be witches and must be exorcised, and the man who plucks chickens for a living. It is within the perimeter of this offbeat microcosm of the world that seemingly small questions---often the kind that children ask, arising from a child's imagined understanding of how the adult world works---assume an eerie Was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to surprise.
192 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 25, 2021
I so enjoy this author's novels that I had to see what her short stories held. I was not disappointed as they are filled with deliciously descriptive words and puzzles to unravel. The thirteen stories may seem to be the telling of common events in the lives of rather plain people in a very average small town, but they are so much more! I'm still thinking about them.
January 22, 2012
A quiet book of stories loosely linked in that they take place in one small rural village. I enjoyed it. Received it for xmas and it lived up to its title.
July 29, 2013
Very...interesting. It's a book of short stories, and several of the short stories seemed to end without really giving any closure.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews