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Chargement... Disruptions: Storiespar Steven Millhauser
Top Five Books of 2023 (593) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. In turn, imaginative and fantastical, thought-provoking, humorous and unsettling Disruptions by Steven Millhauser is a remarkable collection of short stories varying in theme, length, and subject matter – a testimonial to the author’s magnificent range and versatility. The collection comprises a total of eighteen stories, some new as well as several that have been previously published. Among my favorites in the collection ( 5⭐ ) are : After the Beheading examines the aftermath of life in a town after the public beheading (guillotine) of a killer. Guided Tour takes us on a very realistic trip around an old city whose fame has its roots in a popular fairy tale. The Summer of Ladders follows the residents of a town as their obsession with ladders in the summer results in an almost competitive quest to climb to the highest altitude that results in dire consequences for some. The Little People studies the dynamics between humans and a community of tiny people who live in their midst. In The Column Dwellers of Our Town, the top of the columns in the city provide sanctuary to those looking to live out their lives in solitude. In Theater of Shadows a unique show performance in a new theater in town inspires the residents to drastically change their way of life. In Green, we follow a community whose idea of beatification of their neighborhoods involves the removal of all greenery. My ratings for the remaining stories - 4⭐-Late , A Tired Town, A Common Predicament and The Circle of Punishment 3.5⭐- The Fight , A Haunted House Story , Thank You for Your Patience, Kafka in High School 1959, The Change and He Takes, She Takes. 3⭐- One Summer Night Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this superbly penned collection of stories. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. This is my first time reading Steven Millhauser and it surely won’t be my last. Connect with me! ✏ Instagram ✏ My Blog ✏ The StoryGraph I grew up watching The Twilight Zone and reading Edgar Allan Poe. I suppose you could say I have always had a bent toward the fantastic that lies just below the surface of the mundane. Consequently, Steven Millhauser’s new collection of stories, Disruptions, delighted me. I relished these strange tales portraying quaint small towns with their sudden obsessions and young people encountering things that disrupt their lives. There are stories of transformation. The first story, “One Summer Night,” haunted me for days. “In the summer of my sixteenth birthday I fell in love with the night,” it begins. A few minutes in company with an older woman who delights in “the only night that ever was” alters his perception, knowing that everything had changed. Boys dare to sleep in a haunted house only to emerge unable to articulate the transforming experience. A girl walking home in the dark flees a pursuer, finding safety in an alteration. There are stories of communities that engage in a shared obsession for a fad–a shadow puppet theater inspiring a black and white world, the removal of lawns for hardscapes or the competition for higher reaching ladders. One town’s lethargy overcomes them for weeks. A community of acceptance becomes one of prejudice. A guillotine is raised in the public square, a historical tour reenacts a tragedy, a society assumes that punishment for all is expected, and earned. Because these characters and places are so familiar, these stories are disconcerting, revealing too much, recognizable yet bizarre. Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book.
Millhauser might be a mischief-maker, a puzzler, bored with convention yet deferential to classic escalations of tension, wide-eyed, willing to go to the darkest places of our imaginations and investigate not the gritty details, but the things that motivate us to visit the darkness in the first place. On a sentence level, Millhauser favors clarity perhaps more than most of his more experimental contemporaries. Though there is an obvious line from Borges or Nabokov, he is above all a fabulist, and though details occasionally weigh down his stories, he keeps the tale twisting and firmly establishes place, keeping the reader’s feet on the floor before lifting off into flight. His novels and stories are readable, occasionally lyrical, and the plots, though sometimes subtle or playful, grow slowly tense like a string being pulled taut. Millhauser reminds you of Borges sometimes, of Calvino and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between. Millhauser has a Nicholson Baker-like gift for meticulous, closeup description of the ordinary ... For a reader coming to Millhauser for the first time, Disruptions may not be the ideal place to start ... The new collection includes a couple of excellent stories about dreamy, moony, self-conscious adolescents, another of Millhauser’s preoccupations ... All these stories are about transcendence. Millhauser’s new collection is titled “Disruptions.” Several of the stories are among his best; a few are midlevel Millhauser; a handful of others don’t rise above craft. So it goes with books of short stories.... Millhauser’s stories are often about cracks in everyday life, cracks that reveal other possibilities and other modes of living. Sometimes one soul journeys through them; sometimes there are hundreds. His characters often sense they’ve crossed some unmarked border. Maybe they can go back home but, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, they can’t go back all the way. Other times these cracks lead to reefs, where good citizens wreck themselves.... When Millhauser is on, he hands you a periscope of his own unique design, and he allows you to really look and feel. You can bring your own allegory. Review entitled: Stories Like Norman Rockwell Paintings, if Rockwell Painted Guillotines
"Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle that is at once instantly recognizable and profoundly unsettling. Disruptions is a provocative, utterly original new collection from a writer at the peak of his form"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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I find myself having a harder time with short story collections lately. This one didn't really stick with me either, though it did have a few interesting stories mixed in. ( )