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In-Flight Entertainment
"A masterful contemporary exponent of the genre. Simpson now deserves to be compared with Flannery O'Connor and Alice Munro."
— Observer
Poignant, perceptive and dazzling, in this, her long awaited new collection, Helen Simpson offers acute portraits of lives in of changes for the better, lives stalled and in freefall; of love, loss, and sudden revelations. Warm and funny, the stories are also threaded with a sense of anxiety and of growing old, of commitment, and, most worryingly, of the growing threat to the environment.
In the title story, Alan, on a transatlantic flight, is delighted by an unusual upgrade to a first class seat, but is to find his journey disturbed by portents of doom; a family discussion over the fate of a trapped squirrel unexpectedly veers to nearly reveal a shocking truth; and a boy contemplates a parallel life after asking his mother for help with his creative writing homework.
Elsewhere Patrick, newly deaf and belligerent, is forced to re-examine his life with the help of a supernatural hearing aid; a profound, heartfelt and distracted prayer is offered for a friend's health and safety; and in "The Festival of the Immortals", two old friends look back on their lives with joy and regret, as they wait to heckle Charlotte Brontë. Moving deftly between the domestic and the fantastical, from tragedy to comedy, this is a remarkable collection from a master of the genre; each story brilliantly realised, beautifully captured and utterly engrossing.
— Observer
Poignant, perceptive and dazzling, in this, her long awaited new collection, Helen Simpson offers acute portraits of lives in of changes for the better, lives stalled and in freefall; of love, loss, and sudden revelations. Warm and funny, the stories are also threaded with a sense of anxiety and of growing old, of commitment, and, most worryingly, of the growing threat to the environment.
In the title story, Alan, on a transatlantic flight, is delighted by an unusual upgrade to a first class seat, but is to find his journey disturbed by portents of doom; a family discussion over the fate of a trapped squirrel unexpectedly veers to nearly reveal a shocking truth; and a boy contemplates a parallel life after asking his mother for help with his creative writing homework.
Elsewhere Patrick, newly deaf and belligerent, is forced to re-examine his life with the help of a supernatural hearing aid; a profound, heartfelt and distracted prayer is offered for a friend's health and safety; and in "The Festival of the Immortals", two old friends look back on their lives with joy and regret, as they wait to heckle Charlotte Brontë. Moving deftly between the domestic and the fantastical, from tragedy to comedy, this is a remarkable collection from a master of the genre; each story brilliantly realised, beautifully captured and utterly engrossing.
132 pages, Paperback
First published May 6, 2010
19 people are currently reading
303 people want to read
About the author
Helen Simpson
70 books46 followersHelen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1959 in Bristol, in the West of England, and went to a girls' school. She worked at Vogue for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award while her book Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. (In particular, the mystery author Helen de Guerry Simpson is a different author.)
In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta's top 20 novelists under the age of 40.
In 2009, she donated the short story The Tipping Point to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. (In particular, the mystery author Helen de Guerry Simpson is a different author.)
In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta's top 20 novelists under the age of 40.
In 2009, she donated the short story The Tipping Point to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
May 30, 2013
Last week a bloke on a workshop I attended said global warming is nonsense. Helen Simpson’s book is addressed squarely at people like him, and makes no bones about what she feels is the most pressing issue of the day, our imminent destruction if we don’t change our ways. She certainly makes you count up your plane flights – mine I think are 9 (returns), all Europe but I do have a big one to New York coming up (my daughter is studying in the USA for a year). The title story is set on board the same flight – Heathrow to NY - and centres on a man frustrated by one of the passengers inconveniently dying on board, and causing a diversion to Goose Bay, Labrador and thus delaying him. Another passenger talks to him about climate change, rapidly speeded up by plane flights and how we’re all about to be destroyed. He’s on board because he’s 70 and doesn’t care: the food shortages and riots, the flooding – Maldives first - will happen after he’s gone. Not all the stories are on this topic, but a fair number are, culminating in ‘Diary of an Interesting Year’ (2040) where a wife chronicles the appalling details of life after ‘The Big Melt’- rapists, rats, death, starvation – while also complaining about her ‘told-you-so’ husband.
My problem with the book, although they are skilfully done tales, is that they do seem to be fired by this urge to warn us about the forthcoming destruction, to the detriment of the story. Take the story of the budding romance/biking holiday in France, where the couple end up at Angers viewing the medieval end-of-the-world tapestry (it did make me look it up): it felt to me the romance - the twiddling with the hair, the playful headbutting - were secondary to the political or lifestyle points Simpson was making. Her characters sometimes don’t come across as fully functioning human beings. The ones not about global warming often have a biting humour (usually men are the targets): a deaf man finds his hearing aid tunes into his daughter’s bitter thoughts; a young promoted executive dumps his girlfriend in advance – he doesn't have to leave for New York for three months – and is surprised by her screaming reaction. So, a deft writer, able to conjure scenes and situations economically (although I found some dialogue clunky), but I was not engaged enough; a lot of the characters come over as types: the adulterous middle aged man, the put-upon partner. Maybe it’s me - for everyone seems to love her (three pages of high praise quotes at the start of this book), and the prizes pile up – yes, it’s jealousy.
My problem with the book, although they are skilfully done tales, is that they do seem to be fired by this urge to warn us about the forthcoming destruction, to the detriment of the story. Take the story of the budding romance/biking holiday in France, where the couple end up at Angers viewing the medieval end-of-the-world tapestry (it did make me look it up): it felt to me the romance - the twiddling with the hair, the playful headbutting - were secondary to the political or lifestyle points Simpson was making. Her characters sometimes don’t come across as fully functioning human beings. The ones not about global warming often have a biting humour (usually men are the targets): a deaf man finds his hearing aid tunes into his daughter’s bitter thoughts; a young promoted executive dumps his girlfriend in advance – he doesn't have to leave for New York for three months – and is surprised by her screaming reaction. So, a deft writer, able to conjure scenes and situations economically (although I found some dialogue clunky), but I was not engaged enough; a lot of the characters come over as types: the adulterous middle aged man, the put-upon partner. Maybe it’s me - for everyone seems to love her (three pages of high praise quotes at the start of this book), and the prizes pile up – yes, it’s jealousy.
May 24, 2018
Ik vond het een goed boek maar ik moet er ook nog een taak over schrijven dus misschien vind ik het dan niet meer goed. Wie zal het zeggen, het leven zit vol verrassingen.
April 5, 2012
I feel a little harsh giving this two stars, because it wasn't offensive or too dumb or plagued with amateur prose like many other books I have rated similarly... but most of these stories felt incredibly weak to me. A lot of them center around bland, unlikeable characters in inconsequential moments, and that's actually worked for me before with other short story writers, but the characters here are just too thin and frankly, so is the collection.
February 27, 2012
I'm not sure ... I liked it, thought the writing was wonderful and yet some of the stories stayed with me in an unpleasant way. I definitely want to read more by this author.
*Instead, he felt somehow unnerved, he had a weight round his heart, a nasty sinking feeling; which was not like him at all.*
*He had an explosive temper, just as Lara did. The two of them were tinderbox touchy, gigantically flinty. She was sick of acting as the lightning rod for all their casual rage.*
*There are the facts of life, she thought, the predictable traps and horrors. What struck her now though was the irrelevance and centrality of emotion in human life and how the facts happened anyway, whatever you chose to feel about them.*
*Then they stood in the fathomless dark and stared saucer-eyed beyond the stratosphere into the night, as troupes of boisterous planets wheeled across teh blackness all around them.*
*Jacob would get by till middle age, probably, when he would step onto this death as onto the times of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle would rear up and hit him in the face.*
*Instead, he felt somehow unnerved, he had a weight round his heart, a nasty sinking feeling; which was not like him at all.*
*He had an explosive temper, just as Lara did. The two of them were tinderbox touchy, gigantically flinty. She was sick of acting as the lightning rod for all their casual rage.*
*There are the facts of life, she thought, the predictable traps and horrors. What struck her now though was the irrelevance and centrality of emotion in human life and how the facts happened anyway, whatever you chose to feel about them.*
*Then they stood in the fathomless dark and stared saucer-eyed beyond the stratosphere into the night, as troupes of boisterous planets wheeled across teh blackness all around them.*
*Jacob would get by till middle age, probably, when he would step onto this death as onto the times of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle would rear up and hit him in the face.*
November 12, 2014
I picked this small book of short stories at the library. I had not heard of the author before. She is British. There are a lot of quotes praising her writing on the back so I brought it home. The stories are well written, rather caustic, but the theme of the stories made me uncomfortable. Practically every story was about the inevitable end of the world due to climate change. I do believe in climate change but I don't like it to be thrown in my face at every opportunity. I am like many people in that I put my head in the sand when it comes to that issue because it is so scary and so seemingly out of my control. So I am punishing this short story collection by only giving it 3 stars despite the good writing. I just didn't enjoy the uncomfortable feelings the stories brought up. I'm all about comfort!
August 7, 2018
Ironic that this collection should be entitled In-Flight Entertainment as most of the stories go nowhere!
There appear to be 2 themes. 1 Flying is killing the planet and 2 all relationships start out well and then people change and things go down hill.
Maybe it was just that I was feeling ill when reading but at lot of the time it seems like the author is more interested in writing flowery sentences and sticking them in mostly weak stories with unlikeable characters.
There appear to be 2 themes. 1 Flying is killing the planet and 2 all relationships start out well and then people change and things go down hill.
Maybe it was just that I was feeling ill when reading but at lot of the time it seems like the author is more interested in writing flowery sentences and sticking them in mostly weak stories with unlikeable characters.
February 26, 2012
I heard about this book on NPR and was intrigued by the description. Unfortunately these stories happen to be artificial and boring. A poor attempt to use popular buzz words (global warming; adultery, etc.) to inject any interest failed.
May 19, 2014
This was second time round for me and it was no better. There’s nothing badly written or obviously bad, just a bit too preachy with too many unpleasant characters for my liking.
October 13, 2012
This is a book of short stories. The stories are dark. I did not enjoy this collection. I would not want ti as the only book to read on a long flight. i would not take it to read on vacation.
July 30, 2013
oddly disturbing, depressing.
September 7, 2013
Meh. Nothing special
January 26, 2023
I was looking at my bookshelves and grabbed this book (published in 2010) and decided I would read it. That was a mistake. 😟 😕 🙁
Stories were a bit dated, although when reading the first one I thought it was quite timely since it was about climate change. In fact, four or five of them were about climate change. But the majority of the stories were not believable, at least for me, and the writing seemed contrived. The reviewer of the first review below said this collection of stories was not typical of her otherwise excellent writing, so I will not give up on Helen Simpson...after all I have four more works of hers on my bookshelves, of which I have read three but that was years ago and I can’t remember what I did yesterday so it will be fresh reading for me all over again (Dear George; Hey yeah right get a life; Constitutional; four bare legs in a bed).
1. Up at a Villa — 2.5 stars
2. In-flight Entertainment — 2.5 stars (originally published in Granta, online version January 7, 2008)
3. Squirrel — 2 stars
4. Ahead of the Pack — 2 stars (originally published in the Guardian, September 25, 2009)
5. Scan — 2 stars (originally published in Granta, online version, July 2, 2007
6. I’m Sorry but I’ll Have to Let You Go — 3.5 stars
7. Sorry — 3 stars
8. In the Driver’s Seat — 2 stars
9. The Tipping Point — 2 stars (originally published in the Guardian May 23, 2008)
10. Geography Boy — 1.5 stars
11. Channel 17 — 1 star
12. Homework — 1 star (originally published in the New Yorker, June 25, 2007)
13. The Festival of the Immortals — 1 star (originally published in the Guardian, December 32, 2006)
14. Diary of an Interesting Year — 2 stars (originally published in the New Yorker, December 21, 2009)
15. Charm for a Friend with a Lump — 1.5 stars
Helen Simpson is certainly an accomplished writer...look at the awards she has garnered:
• 2011 PEN/O.Henry Prize for Diary of an Interesting Year
2006 Travelling Scholarship (Society of Authors)
2002 E.M.Forster Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2001 Hawthornden Prize
1996 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
1993 Best of Young British Novelists, Granta
1991 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
1991 Somerset Maugham Award
Reviews:
• Ha! This reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, agrees with me! ‘over all the tales feel stilted and contrived, and in some cases tendentious — something her earlier work always assiduously avoided. ’ https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/bo...
• Ho! This reviewer does not agree with me... https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• Interview of Ms. Simpson: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
• https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/...
Stories were a bit dated, although when reading the first one I thought it was quite timely since it was about climate change. In fact, four or five of them were about climate change. But the majority of the stories were not believable, at least for me, and the writing seemed contrived. The reviewer of the first review below said this collection of stories was not typical of her otherwise excellent writing, so I will not give up on Helen Simpson...after all I have four more works of hers on my bookshelves, of which I have read three but that was years ago and I can’t remember what I did yesterday so it will be fresh reading for me all over again (Dear George; Hey yeah right get a life; Constitutional; four bare legs in a bed).
1. Up at a Villa — 2.5 stars
2. In-flight Entertainment — 2.5 stars (originally published in Granta, online version January 7, 2008)
3. Squirrel — 2 stars
4. Ahead of the Pack — 2 stars (originally published in the Guardian, September 25, 2009)
5. Scan — 2 stars (originally published in Granta, online version, July 2, 2007
6. I’m Sorry but I’ll Have to Let You Go — 3.5 stars
7. Sorry — 3 stars
8. In the Driver’s Seat — 2 stars
9. The Tipping Point — 2 stars (originally published in the Guardian May 23, 2008)
10. Geography Boy — 1.5 stars
11. Channel 17 — 1 star
12. Homework — 1 star (originally published in the New Yorker, June 25, 2007)
13. The Festival of the Immortals — 1 star (originally published in the Guardian, December 32, 2006)
14. Diary of an Interesting Year — 2 stars (originally published in the New Yorker, December 21, 2009)
15. Charm for a Friend with a Lump — 1.5 stars
Helen Simpson is certainly an accomplished writer...look at the awards she has garnered:
• 2011 PEN/O.Henry Prize for Diary of an Interesting Year
2006 Travelling Scholarship (Society of Authors)
2002 E.M.Forster Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
2001 Hawthornden Prize
1996 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
1993 Best of Young British Novelists, Granta
1991 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
1991 Somerset Maugham Award
Reviews:
• Ha! This reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, agrees with me! ‘over all the tales feel stilted and contrived, and in some cases tendentious — something her earlier work always assiduously avoided. ’ https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/bo...
• Ho! This reviewer does not agree with me... https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• Interview of Ms. Simpson: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
• https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/...
September 15, 2017
This was a re-read and funny enough it was indeed my in-flight entertainment-- more appealing to me, for some reason, than the wealth of movies on the plane.
Simpson has prose that's both gorgeous and easy, almost conversational. This book takes the domestic territory she has mastered into the dystopian. I can remember reading Diary of an Interesting Year in the New Yorker -- a story that presents the encroaching end days in diary format-- and thinking perhaps it was a bit over the top. Sorry to say it seems less so with each passing day, although I would say that some entries in that particular story are more effective than others. Which is perhaps being too hard on an excellent writer, for the very reason that she is so skilled.
The title story was especially unsettling to read while flying and I've been in a bargaining mood with my carbon footprint all day long. Sorry? reads like an homage to Cheever's The Enormous Radio, but with a twist. Highly recommend this although have to say I have even more fondness for Simpson's earlier books.
Simpson has prose that's both gorgeous and easy, almost conversational. This book takes the domestic territory she has mastered into the dystopian. I can remember reading Diary of an Interesting Year in the New Yorker -- a story that presents the encroaching end days in diary format-- and thinking perhaps it was a bit over the top. Sorry to say it seems less so with each passing day, although I would say that some entries in that particular story are more effective than others. Which is perhaps being too hard on an excellent writer, for the very reason that she is so skilled.
The title story was especially unsettling to read while flying and I've been in a bargaining mood with my carbon footprint all day long. Sorry? reads like an homage to Cheever's The Enormous Radio, but with a twist. Highly recommend this although have to say I have even more fondness for Simpson's earlier books.
June 15, 2016
First off, as I typically do with short story collections, let me do a brief run-down of each of the stories:
#1 "In Flight Entertainment" (title story, obvs) -- Alan is boarding a flight to Chicago when he pleasantly finds he's been upgraded to first class. While on the flight, he gets in a conversation with the man seated across from him, talking most of global warming and carbon emissions, all while another passenger on the flight falls into what appears to be likely fatal illness right behind them.
#2 "Squirrel" -- Lara, her husband and her daughter are gathered in the kitchen talking about the squirrel problem around the house (her husband has one trapped under a trash can lid as they speak). The conversation drifts to the daughter's school lessons on Henry VIII and the adultery charges he brought against wife Anne Boleyn. The topic secretly has Lara contemplating her own marriage as well as a secret infidelity she hasn't told anyone about.
#3 "I'm Sorry But I'll Have To Let You Go" -- A 24 year old British man gets an opportunity for career advancement in the United States, decides he's not up for a long-distance relationship so he breaks up with his girlfriend. She doesn't take the news well.
#4 "Scan" -- A woman is being scanned for a possible brain tumor and while she is in the machine, her thoughts drift everywhere from thoughts on art to mortality to the history and process of X-Ray.
#5 "Ahead Of The Pack" -- The narrator of the story is giving his sales pitch / business plan for an eco-friendly weight loss company
#6 "Sorry?" -- A man who has recently gone deaf in one ear tries out a new hearing aide and discovers that he may be hearing things that are not actually there or at least not audible to anyone else
#7 "The Tipping Point" -- An English / Drama teacher takes on the arguments of an eco-warrior ex
#8 "Geography Boy" -- Brendan is taking his girlfriend Adele on a bicycling tour of Angers, France. They take in the history while Brendan tries his best to convince her to join his group of environmental protestors.
#9 "Channel 17" -- The story of three different couples (who don't know each other) staying in a hotel in France and how all their stories seem to involve this one bizarre television channel that seems to air nothing except a video of a woman seductively lowering her stockings, then pulling them back up
#10 "Homework" -- A mother is helping her 13 year old son with a homework assignment -- to write about a life changing moment. Between them, they craft a fabricated story about how the boy was changed by his parents' divorce.
#11 "The Festival Of The Immortals" -- Two long lost friends bump into each other and reconnect at a bookish festival where dead (classic lit.) authors come back to life and offer speeches, seminars and workshops on the craft of writing.
#12 "Diary Of An Interesting Year" -- It's the year 2040. The air is polluted to the point of everyone needing to wear masks pretty much all the time. Food is super scarce and rationed, many people starving. The barter system is the preferred method of payment over money. For her birthday, our narrator is given an old spiral notebook and still-working pen salvaged from somewhere. She records what happens that year, covering the mundane up to the most grim & graphic topics.
#13 "Charm For A Friend With A Lump" -- The narrator tries to lift the spirits of a friend battling cancer by asking for her help in designing a garden
MY THOUGHTS ON THE COLLECTION:
* The story "Scan" jumped around with the imagery WAAY too much, to the point where I was picturing some low-budget college art film in my head. Didn't love it.
* "Diary Of An Interesting Year" reminded me a bit of The Road by Cormac McCarthy -- in fact, there's one bit in this short story about the trees falling and nearly killing people that sounded eerily similar to the same image from The Road (of the trees falling and people fearing death, I mean). I was also a little taken aback at how dark this story got, much more so than any other story in the collection. Sure, the opening scenes are dystopian, so I would expect the descriptions of scarce food, damaged ecology, fight with others for provision but then it takes a turn real hard into murder, rape and abortion!
* As a whole, I felt like Simpson's writing style / ability were solid... can't really say I noticed anything to fault there. It's just that so many of these stories fell SO FLAT. Each story felt like it started with the potential to go quirky and thought-provoking but ended up so bland! Also, the endings -- stupid, unsatisfying endings that just stop suddenly and leave you feeling like your time invested in reading these stories ends up being pretty pointless.
I was a little surprised that so many of the stories ended up having a bit of an eco-fiction lean to them, as it's not really advertised as being a running theme in the book's synopsis. While eco-fiction has become one of my favorite genres to read in recent years, these stories bordered on preachy at times. I feel that it's unlikely that any of these stories will stick with me long-term, but of the tales gathered here, I'd say the ones that stood out most to me personally were "Geography Boy", "The Festival Of The Immortals", "Diary Of An Interesting Year" and "Charm For A Friend With A Lump". These struck me as having the most compelling characters and felt the most thought-out works in the bunch.
#1 "In Flight Entertainment" (title story, obvs) -- Alan is boarding a flight to Chicago when he pleasantly finds he's been upgraded to first class. While on the flight, he gets in a conversation with the man seated across from him, talking most of global warming and carbon emissions, all while another passenger on the flight falls into what appears to be likely fatal illness right behind them.
#2 "Squirrel" -- Lara, her husband and her daughter are gathered in the kitchen talking about the squirrel problem around the house (her husband has one trapped under a trash can lid as they speak). The conversation drifts to the daughter's school lessons on Henry VIII and the adultery charges he brought against wife Anne Boleyn. The topic secretly has Lara contemplating her own marriage as well as a secret infidelity she hasn't told anyone about.
#3 "I'm Sorry But I'll Have To Let You Go" -- A 24 year old British man gets an opportunity for career advancement in the United States, decides he's not up for a long-distance relationship so he breaks up with his girlfriend. She doesn't take the news well.
#4 "Scan" -- A woman is being scanned for a possible brain tumor and while she is in the machine, her thoughts drift everywhere from thoughts on art to mortality to the history and process of X-Ray.
#5 "Ahead Of The Pack" -- The narrator of the story is giving his sales pitch / business plan for an eco-friendly weight loss company
#6 "Sorry?" -- A man who has recently gone deaf in one ear tries out a new hearing aide and discovers that he may be hearing things that are not actually there or at least not audible to anyone else
#7 "The Tipping Point" -- An English / Drama teacher takes on the arguments of an eco-warrior ex
#8 "Geography Boy" -- Brendan is taking his girlfriend Adele on a bicycling tour of Angers, France. They take in the history while Brendan tries his best to convince her to join his group of environmental protestors.
#9 "Channel 17" -- The story of three different couples (who don't know each other) staying in a hotel in France and how all their stories seem to involve this one bizarre television channel that seems to air nothing except a video of a woman seductively lowering her stockings, then pulling them back up
#10 "Homework" -- A mother is helping her 13 year old son with a homework assignment -- to write about a life changing moment. Between them, they craft a fabricated story about how the boy was changed by his parents' divorce.
#11 "The Festival Of The Immortals" -- Two long lost friends bump into each other and reconnect at a bookish festival where dead (classic lit.) authors come back to life and offer speeches, seminars and workshops on the craft of writing.
#12 "Diary Of An Interesting Year" -- It's the year 2040. The air is polluted to the point of everyone needing to wear masks pretty much all the time. Food is super scarce and rationed, many people starving. The barter system is the preferred method of payment over money. For her birthday, our narrator is given an old spiral notebook and still-working pen salvaged from somewhere. She records what happens that year, covering the mundane up to the most grim & graphic topics.
#13 "Charm For A Friend With A Lump" -- The narrator tries to lift the spirits of a friend battling cancer by asking for her help in designing a garden
MY THOUGHTS ON THE COLLECTION:
* The story "Scan" jumped around with the imagery WAAY too much, to the point where I was picturing some low-budget college art film in my head. Didn't love it.
* "Diary Of An Interesting Year" reminded me a bit of The Road by Cormac McCarthy -- in fact, there's one bit in this short story about the trees falling and nearly killing people that sounded eerily similar to the same image from The Road (of the trees falling and people fearing death, I mean). I was also a little taken aback at how dark this story got, much more so than any other story in the collection. Sure, the opening scenes are dystopian, so I would expect the descriptions of scarce food, damaged ecology, fight with others for provision but then it takes a turn real hard into murder, rape and abortion!
* As a whole, I felt like Simpson's writing style / ability were solid... can't really say I noticed anything to fault there. It's just that so many of these stories fell SO FLAT. Each story felt like it started with the potential to go quirky and thought-provoking but ended up so bland! Also, the endings -- stupid, unsatisfying endings that just stop suddenly and leave you feeling like your time invested in reading these stories ends up being pretty pointless.
I was a little surprised that so many of the stories ended up having a bit of an eco-fiction lean to them, as it's not really advertised as being a running theme in the book's synopsis. While eco-fiction has become one of my favorite genres to read in recent years, these stories bordered on preachy at times. I feel that it's unlikely that any of these stories will stick with me long-term, but of the tales gathered here, I'd say the ones that stood out most to me personally were "Geography Boy", "The Festival Of The Immortals", "Diary Of An Interesting Year" and "Charm For A Friend With A Lump". These struck me as having the most compelling characters and felt the most thought-out works in the bunch.
Read
July 26, 2023I love a good collection of short stories, but this one didn't quite do it for me. All the stories revolved around climate change and were a very mixed bag. A few winners, but I found most to be pretty dry.
August 5, 2012
I read this book based on the strength of Simpson's short story, Diary of an Interesting Year, which ran in the New Yorker about two years ago. It was one of the most riveting pieces of short fiction I'd ever read, a harrowing account of a couple in the near future fleeing London in the wake of "The Big Melt." It appears in this book as the penultimate entry, bookending the collection nicely, as the first story (if one can call them that) is about a pair of airline passengers debating global warming while waiting for a man who died midflight to be removed from their plane. If they were still around by the end of the book, the first guy would surely owe the second a roll of Certs or a can of beans or whatever they might find of value in a dying world.
These aren't stories so much as one-act plays built on the characters' self-delusions and pettiness. There is an undercurrent of dark humor throughout (which never hurts) and I never felt like I had entered a quagmire or a literary slog. That said, the collection does take on something of a monotone, each entry being written essentially as monologue or dialogue and the other stories never achieve the strength of the one which convinced me to read the collection in the first place, so it was something of a let-down, albeit an enjoyable one.
These aren't stories so much as one-act plays built on the characters' self-delusions and pettiness. There is an undercurrent of dark humor throughout (which never hurts) and I never felt like I had entered a quagmire or a literary slog. That said, the collection does take on something of a monotone, each entry being written essentially as monologue or dialogue and the other stories never achieve the strength of the one which convinced me to read the collection in the first place, so it was something of a let-down, albeit an enjoyable one.
August 7, 2016
The story “Diary of an Interesting Year” appeared in the New Yorker some years back and was so striking to me in its originality, compactness, and grim effect that I was drawn to this collection by Helen Simpson. And “Diary”--set in 2040 in a swampy England ruined by climate change--remains a total gem, no doubt. It’s a great piece to teach in creative writing to demonstrate form, voice, show-don’t-tell, and so on. However, the rest of In Flight Entertainment was disappointing. Simpson is good at dialogue, really good, I think, but the main problem is that the characters’ interactions and dialogue lacks greater purpose. At the risk of trotting out a critical cliché, I say these stories too often just don’t go anywhere. They are more premise than follow-through, with themes of marital discord and aging front and center but with not very much done with those themes. I don’t like getting to the end of a story and asking “That’s it?” And I like it even less when I’m asking that same question over and over.
February 23, 2012
In-Flight Entertainment: Stories is a bland book of stories that contains characters that are uninteresting and far from the reader's concern. The contents are made up of stories that read more like reports of small episodes or incidents in a person's daily life and have no drama that might spark the heart to beat faster. In one story a man's lover is more interested in the environment than she is in him. In another, a man loses his hearing and begins to experience internal sounds and perhaps even auditory hallucinations. These sounds tell him about his failure as a father. In yet another story, a man catches a squirrel and tries to decide whether to kill it or not while his wife reflects on the affair she's having, hoping her husband does not know about it.
I am a lover of short stories, cherishing Alice Munro and many contemporary short story writers. Ms. Simpson's stories just don't hold up to these and I'm sorry to say that I was very disappointed in this collection.
I am a lover of short stories, cherishing Alice Munro and many contemporary short story writers. Ms. Simpson's stories just don't hold up to these and I'm sorry to say that I was very disappointed in this collection.
October 5, 2012
I don't know why I thought this would be a book about fun stories from an airline. It totally wasn't. It started off strong, as short story books like these do and then died a horrible horrible death. Thankfully, the upside was there was nothing to follow, each chapter was it'\s own story, they were short, the book was small and short and it was over quickly. Some where entertaining, some where boring, I don't remember any of them and I doubt I'll remember this book in a month from now. Also, the author is of British origin, which made for some different reading patterns then I am used to. Unless it's chick-lit, count me out.
July 7, 2017
Lots of the stories had a theme of climate change, as well as the impact flight has on the climate.
Many of the stories occurred during travel -- flight, tube, etc.
The stories are mostly vignettes in people's lives.
The stories have a very British flavor to them (not surprising since she's a British author).
Many of the stories occurred during travel -- flight, tube, etc.
The stories are mostly vignettes in people's lives.
The stories have a very British flavor to them (not surprising since she's a British author).
April 29, 2013
This book got so much attention when it came out and I was so excited to read it - and it was such a let-down. There are so many fantastic short story collections out this year, this one did not deserve so much review space.
October 13, 2012
This is a book of short stories. Stories that are dark. I did not really enjoy this book. I would hate to have it as the only available to read on a long flight. Nor would I put in a bag to read during vacation.
August 3, 2013
I picked up this book for $1 because I heard the author discuss it on NPR last year. (And ironically, I read most of it on a plane!) These stories were just okay, nothing that's going to stick with me.
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August 4, 2011Meh.
March 16, 2012
She's a little hung up on global warming, I think. Like any collection, some stories were stronger than others, but nothing stood out as spectacular.
May 22, 2012
Short stories that didn't go anywhere. A disappointment. Liked her other work.
May 28, 2012
A collection of short stories that are more like random thoughts that ramble on for a few pages each, and end up nowhere.
January 6, 2013
Helen Simpson is quite the gloomster these days. This is a depressingly nihilistic and strangely curated collection "everything no one would publish first time round"? Read something else.
March 4, 2017
I never like short stories, but this was recommended by the blogger "Mid-Life Chic" so I gave it a try. Nope, I still don't like short stories. I want to know more about the characters and the plot.
September 17, 2025
I haven't read a book of short stories in quite some time. The stories ranged from grim to weird to hilarious to confusing and the last one, sweet. Tying them together with the theme of climate change is interesting.
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