Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Scribner, 2006.
"Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. This celebrated volume gathers together her complete work - four short collections of stunning stories about marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation.
With her inimitable compassion and wit, Hempel introduces characters who make choices that seem inevitable, and whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience.
For readers who have known Hempel's work for decades and for those who are just discovering her, this indispensable volume contains all the stories in Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. No reader of great writing should be without it."
"Hempel's four collections of short fiction are all masterful; while readers await the follow-up to last year's acclaimed The Dog of the Marriage, this compendium restores the full set to print. The first of Hempel's books, Reasons to Live (1985), is justly celebrated by Rick Moody in his preface as a landmark of its era's "short-story renaissance"; it introduces Hempel's unmistakable tone, where a "besieged consciousness," Moody says, hones sentences to bladelike sharpness "to enact and defend survival." The second, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), is the main reason to buy this book: used copies are scarce, and the collection contains stories like "The Harvest." Hempel's genius, whether in first or third person, is to make her characters' feelings completely integral to the scenes they inhabit; her terse descriptions become elegantly telegraphic—and telepathic—reportage, with not a word wasted and not a single fact embellished. Her great subject is the failure of human coupling, and she charts it at every stage: giddy beginnings, sexy thick-of-its, wan (or violent) outcomes, grim aftermaths. Seeing it laid out kaleidoscopically in this volume is an awesome thing indeed, and a pleasure lovers of the short story will not want to deny themselves." - Publishers Weekly
"With the publication of her first book of short stories, Reasons to Live (1985), Hempel earned a strong position in the vanguard of the minimalist school of fiction writing, in vogue at that time and especially significant in the short story genre. Her three succeeding collections of stories, the most recent being The Dog of the Marriage (2005), maintained her high stature as a short story writer. She generally continued to compose tightly hewn stories despite the fact that minimalism as a stylistic movement was shrinking around her like a drying riverbed. The stories from her previous collections are gathered here into a single volume, and her achievement in the form is now boldly obvious. She has never imitated, never been just a somewhat anonymous member of a pack of talented storywriters. She is an original, having found--and kept--her unique way of expressing her not so much cut-and-dried as deeply penetrating vision. As the 70-page story "Tumble Home" testifies, Hempel can write longer than usual for her, and certainly that interior monologue by a patient in a mental institution is arresting in its pristine tracing of a pattern of thought. Nevertheless, she is at her best by far in the short, highly imagistic, sparely plotted, stiletto-keen slice of narrative that in her hands glistens in its sheerness, and for that she has made short story history." - Brad Hooper
"A quietly powerful presence in American fiction during the past two decades, Hempel has demonstrated unusual discipline in assembling her urbane, pointillistic and wickedly funny short stories. Since the publication of her first collection, "Reasons to Live," in 1985, only three more slim volumes have appeared - a total of some 15,000 sentences, and nearly every one of them has a crisp, distinctive bite. These collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart, neurotic, somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound." - The New York Times
"The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel gathers together the complete work of a writer whose voice is as singular and astonishing as any in American fiction. Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
When "Reasons to Live, " Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune" called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, " her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections "Tumble Home" and "The Dog of the Marriage." As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, ""The Dog of the Marriage, " the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact." "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work." - www.booksandbooks.com
"I recommend The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. I read Hempel’s story “Havest” last year in my senior English class. It was the best thing I had read in years. Hempel writes only short stories and she is a master of the craft. She writes in a minimalist postmodern style that forces the reader to become involved in the story, always telling him to ask “what” and “why”. Each story is personal. They draw out emotions and can leave you crying then laughing then crying again within the span of ten minutes. After you read just one of her stories you’ll sit and think. How long has it been since you’ve done that? How long has it been since you’ve sat and taken a minute to see how you’re feeling? It’s probably been a while. Her stories force you to do this. I love her stories so much so that if I could bring three books on a desert island I would bring The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel to read, a military survival guide and Twilight to burn." - The Oxford Spokesman
"All four of Hempel’s books (Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdon, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage) are contained in this this volume. Reading it all at once is a feast. It’s gluttony, really, but you probably won’t be able to help yourself either. It’s also a prize: inexplicably, some of her work had fallen out of print.
Hempel is the kind of writer other writers love: sentences to die for, but not the most prolific output on earth. (Though, if pressed, who wouldn’t want more stories from her?) In Stranger Than Fiction in an essay called “Not Chasing Amy” Chuck Palahniuk tells us:
At first, “The Harvest” looks like a laundry list of details. You have no idea why you’re almost weeping by the end of seven pages. You’re a little confused and disoriented. It’s just a simple list of facts presented in the first person, but somehow it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Most of the facts are funny as hell, but at the last moment, when you’re disarmed by laughter, it breaks your heart.
She breaks your heart. First and foremost. That evil Amy Hempel. That’s the first bit Tom teaches you. A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart. The last bit is you will never write this well. You won’t learn this part until you’ve ruined a lot of paper, wasting your free time with a pen in one hand for years and years. At any horrible moment, you might pick up a copy of Amy Hempel and find your best work is just a cheap rip-off of her worst.
So, yes, Hempel is amazing. She can smack you up side the head, and you had no hint, no warning you should duck. Mostly these surprises are in the writing, the precise turn of phrase, though once it was because I recognized the story she was telling. Having a fictionalized piece of that from another point of view was jarring, but then good stories can result in twists in your gut, can’t they?
It seems wrong not to quote Hempel here, because she does really write lines to die for, the kind that are so good you want to babble about them to other people. Thing is, taken out of context (and perhaps coherency, it’s easy to get worked up once you start quoting) they just maybe sound not quite so genius as they do in the story, where they were made and belong.
Part of my reluctance, too, is that I want potential readers to have the pleasure for themselves. If you love short stories, good stories, go get this book. Whether you slowly savor it, or finish it as fast as you can hardly matters. You’ll be reading it again. Highly recommended." - 12frogs book reviews
"The characters in this collection's 48 stories are full of odd bits of advice. A few of these are little more than cute - plug an ice cream cone with a marshmallow to keep the bottom from dripping -- but many bring the reader a resonating, smile-dissolving chill. "Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep," a character in one story says. "I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own." A woman in another story passes along a police officer's advice to always keep your doorknobs polished: "When someone breaks in," the officer told her, "we can get clear prints."
Hempel's stories are both low-key and off-key, and part of their power comes from the author's ability to give characters unexpected routes to essential realizations. "Once I had food poisoning," a character recalls, "and realized I was trapped inside my body."
There are many brief stories here, including several that come and go with little impact, but the collection's treasure is the 70-page novella "Tumble Home," in which a young woman in a psychiatric institution writes to a famous painter she met just once. Like the others in this rich and original collection, she attempts to endure both bad advice -- "buy oversized furniture so as to look small and delicate when curled up in a chair" -- and her own essential realizations: "No one has ever told me that I am good with children." This book's characters seem always to be responding to such things, and the reader is grateful to Hempel when the very occasional breather arrives, when we can practically hear a character's abiding sigh. "What can I say about myself today?" the woman from "Tumble Home" wonders to her letter's recipient, before arriving at this lovely image: "That I am the last to close a window when it rains." - Stephen Schenkenberg
"Few fiction writers are as intensely admired by their peers as is Hempel, though she's never published a novel. Her reputation rests solely on the four landmark collections of short fiction gathered here, including the long-out-of-print At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (used copies of which are both rare and expensive). She will forever be tagged a minimalist, which is accurate enough if largely unrevealing, since there's both great and execrable minimalist fiction. True, a ruthless economy characterizes her writing, but it's owing not to a studied lack of affect (an attribute that marks the most predictable and lazy minimalism) but rather to a lapidary precision and a severe, poetic aesthetic. Often she startlingly punctuates that aesthetic with a wit, reminiscent of Deborah Eisenberg's, that has evolved from the sly and often loopy to the dark and mordant (Hempel has a gift for the off-kilter one-liner; in a story in her most recent collection, the narrator deploys one on a man who's raping her). Dogs are Hempel's career-long obsession, and no one has written of them and their relationship to human beings with more exquisite sensitivity and clear-eyed affection. Another constant is loss: nearly all her stories, written in a perfectly modulated voice, circle around broken people and the dissolutions, disillusionments, and bereavements they endure. Although leavened by a wry rue, Hempel's is a hard-boiled sensibility, and each of her stories -- many only a few pages long, and one of which consists of a single sentence -- will leave the reader shaken, for they're all spot-on exemplars of V. S. Pritchett's 1982 description of the genre as "the glancing form of fiction that seems to be right for the nervousness and restlessness of modern life." - Benjamin Schwarz
"Although Amy Hempel is little known outside the world of American fiction, she is deeply respected, even revered in her native US, as Rick Moody's effusive introduction to these collected stories indicates. Hempel, whose economic, oblique style of writing is most often compared to Raymond Carver, began to publish in the mid-1980s when short fiction, with Carver the doyen, was at its zenith. Following the millennial vogue for disproportionately long novels, the genre is reclaiming attention in a more self-consciously pared-down age. Hempel is, therefore, subject to some retrospective scrutiny.
In this volume, which comprises her four extant collections, dogs abound in almost every piece. And not simply dogs; animals here exist as catalysts, bystanders, protectors: "saints, guardian angels, my saviors, my friends".
Set mostly in the small beach towns around San Francisco, with its unique "eucalyptus fog", the voice in each tale – sometimes no more than a paragraph long – is generally that of a woman, sardonic, disaffected, lived in and lived through, often finding herself in blackly comic situations with neighbours, parents, in cars, and hospitals; always at the fag-end of a relationship. As one narrator comments: "I don't want to meet men. I know some already."
In "The Harvest", a woman involved in a horrific car accident is abandoned by the man she has been seeing for a week. "Do you think looks are important? I asked the man before he left. 'Not at first,' he said." Later the narrator explains in a coda that she has, in fact, exaggerated many of the circumstances of the piece. In what amounts to a sedulously neat masterclass in writing, this is a revision which amplifies, rather than detracts.
As Moody asserts, the brevity Hempel employs is almost Japanese, haiku-like in its precision. That is, until you get to "Tumble Down", the title story in Hempel's third collection, which at first glance is a ruminative letter from a woman hospitalised after a breakdown to a renowned artist she has met only once. In between the daily asides, oddball characters and petty humours of the institutionalised, we slowly learn of her grief at her mother's recent suicide.
In its length, pace and pathos, there is a semblance of an earlier, graver tradition of European writing. "I wish it never got any darker than this," she writes, "the moment that you can no longer tell that grass is green." In sleep she adopts the position her dead mother was found in, her anguish the more piercing because it is evident that theirs was a bitter relationship.
Hempel cleverly explores a similar ambiguity in two final stories – "The Uninvited", in which a childless woman approaching 50 suspects she might be pregnant as the result of a rape, and the erotic, exquisitely painful "Offertory". A relationship is ignited, then bleakly determined by the man insisting that the woman relate, each time they make love, the intimate details of her long-ago ménage à trois with a married couple. "Unimprovable," he says at the end. An adjective which – dogs notwithstanding – can be easily applied to the majority of these stories." - Catherine Taylor
"This could be a very short review. Read this book. But don't read it as I did. Please, not as I read it. All right: I guess I had better explain.
Book reviewers must have deadlines. Readers, luckily, do not. Amy Hempel's "Collected Stories" is made up of four slim volumes: "Reasons to Live," published in 1985; "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom," 1990; "Tumble Home," 1997; and "The Dog of the Marriage," 2005. More than 20 years to accumulate just over 400 pages: it's no wonder these stories, which often have the outward appearance of fragments, move with such contained power. They are eerie, unsettling, always original and perfectly expressed. Each one sets itself off like a depth charge in the reader's head. Each deserves time — quite a lot of time — to be allowed to do its work. Reading these stories one after the other — as I sometimes had to — carries two unfortunate risks. The first is that the stories, most of them narrated in the first person, may blur into one another — though in reality there is only a slight chance of this, so vivid and true is Hempel's voice. The second, graver, danger is that spending too long at a stretch in Hempel's disquieting atmosphere will give you what I can describe only as a case of the literary bends. Hempel's world is modern, set in a vivid present that only very occasionally feels historical. ("Him?" a character sneers. "The only book he ever read was the first chapter of 'Iacocca.' ") Yet the overall sense of this book is one of almost classical tragedy. Here, to be sure, is beauty, and pity, and fear.
Maybe I'm being too serious. Because Amy Hempel is funny, too, blackly funny, and her humor hits you right away. Her stories snap open: "The first three days are the worst, they say, but it's been two weeks, and I'm still waiting for those first three days to be over" —that's the start of "Du Jour," which at three pages is a fairly characteristic Hempel length. Her temporal universe is quite her own: "The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me" — there's the first sentence of "The Harvest." "Breathing Jesus" begins (of course): "Things turned around after I saw the Breathing Jesus." These opening sentences give you a feel for her work: Hempel's narrators are smart, damaged loners whose lives have a sense of being salvaged from a wreck. The humor is mordant, rather than what is commonly called redemptive; indeed, if you were to simply describe many of these stories, there would seem no hope of redemption anywhere. But hold on.
So first: how to describe them? The "events" of the stories aren't really the point; it's better to talk about Hempel's recurrent themes. Simple to start with death, the abiding presence of this book, particularly as it is the wellspring of the novella "Tumble Home," set within the walls of an asylum. "When I go to sleep, I sleep on the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in — lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets." When you come to this passage, it will seem familiar; it appears too in "Tom-Rock Through the Eels," a glimpse of the narrator's life before she is confined. The cause of her confinement — you would not call this narrator mad — may be her mother's suicide, may be a failed relationship with an artist to whom she writes obsessively; the whole tale is addressed to "you." The locutions of one of her fellow inmates convey her spooky flair for language: "Warren says, when he is angry, that he's as mad as all outdoors. He says do I want to meet him after dinner and chew the rug? He says he can't always follow the threat of my conversation."
Mortality is everywhere here; "The Most Girl Part of You" might just be about two necking teenagers, Big Guy and the narrator — if it weren't for the nearly casual mention of Big Guy's mother's death. (When the necking happens, "we take the length of the couch, squirming like maggots in ashes.") Whose is the dead baby in "The Annex"? It's never quite clear. The annex itself is the annex to a cemetery; the narrator lives across the street; perhaps this is the same cemetery that is across the street in "The Uninvited," although the two stories originally appeared in different volumes. What use is "perhaps" to the reader? A great deal, in Hempel's case; it allows the reader room to move, to think, to feel.
The fear of human connection — especially the connection between mother and child — is another theme of Hempel's. "The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me," says the narrator of "Tumble Home." That fear is a failure of empathy, a failure that haunts the powerful story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." This story is the very first one she ever wrote, which might give aspiring writers pause for thought. In it, a woman doesn't quite rise to the task of supporting a dying friend; it's as simple, as awful, as that. As the narrator of that story says: "What seems dangerous often is not — black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy." There it is again: the threat of Amy Hempel's conversation.
There are mudslides and earthquakes; the ground itself is unstable. In such a universe, where can hope — or the tricky business of redemption — be found? In "the clean way a dog enlists your heart," for one. The pure love (love of, love from) animals, and especially dogs, is a healing vein through this volume. The narrator of "The Dog of the Marriage" trains guide dogs: "I work with these dogs every day, and their capability, their decency, shames me." It's no wonder, with the kind of human beings found here; this book's closing story, "Offertory," is a freezing, burning tale of sexual obsession; the narrator's lover persuades her to tell stories of a past affair with a married couple. Hempel's plain, unexplicit language somehow conveys the madness of desire; and so, it is in just such a story — apparently harsh, seemingly cold — that Hempel's genius, and a kind of redemption, can really be found.
For here is the redemption of real art. You could call Hempel part of a movement in the trajectory of the American short story, and Rick Moody, in his intelligent introduction, places her alongside Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Ann Beattie and others — women writers who rise above what he sees as the "rage" and posturing of their male counterparts. But in the end such comparisons don't matter. Amy Hempel is herself. You read her stories and wonder, Why are they so wonderful? The answer comes to you at the very end of this volume, in a line toward the close of "Offertory." "Because a human being made this." That's all you need to know. Take it slowly. You'll see what I mean." - Erica Wagner
Amy Hempel: The Most Girl Part of You
Chuck Palahniuk on Amy Hempel
Kelli Deeth's Response to Amy Hempel's "In A Tub"
[very negative] "Review Of The Collected Stories Of Amy Hempel" by Dan Schneider
The Paris Review Interview
Intervie by Suzan Sherman
Interview by Jessica Murphy Moo
"Forty-Eight Ways of Looking at Amy Hempel" interview with Amy Hempel by Dave Weich
"A Long Time Coming" Interview by Rob Hart
Collected Stories Read it at Google Books
Tumble Home by Amy Hempel
The Dog of the Marriage: Stories
"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel (story)
