The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

exquisite - is it a weird compliment to say that Amy Hempel is phenomenally good at writing sentences? There's a strong flavor of asian literature's tendency toward sparsity of language that can become so entrancing it takes a moment to reflect on the 'heavy' nature of some of her characters and their situations.

My alltime favorite book. Her sense of simplicity is what makes it complex. Who needs a whole page devoted to describing a tree? She can evoke three different emotions (including the hardest to elicit in print: humor) on one page. In a word: genuis!!!

I got more than halfway through this before I realized I'd had my fill of Amy Hempel, at least for a while. I don't feel the need to worship her sentences, although a number of them made me appreciate her talent. I just couldn't muster the love for her that others like Chuck Palahniuk have expressed, even though I wanted to.

I knew going into the book that her writing style had been praised as simplistic and in that is where the reader will find the most substance. I couldn't agree more. However, the simplicity caused feelings of polarity in me. I felt complacent, yet conflicted, smart, yet dumb. I've often felt that I could write like this, effortless. But how much effort do you put into avoiding a struggle?

This is staggeringly beautiful writing. Line for line, quote for quote, Hempel puts on a an absolute clinic in how truly artistic the English language can be. In a single line she can do more than most authors can do in entire pages, or books even. Calling her a genius would be selling her short.

This will be something I continually come back to for years to come. There is nothing quite like it. Just an astounding collection.

I only read books by women named Amy. JK
Another excellent collection of short stories that my writerly self longs to incorporate into my writerly self.

These stories are amazing-- I wanted to write every other sentence down somewhere so I wouldn't forget it's beauty!

elusive and disjunctive. bald sentences that ring true but don't connect with anything around it. lots of 1st person narrators without exposition (where when what why). echoes of other stories in the books. hard to pin down, resolve, picture. dogs, graves, cemetaries.

Loved every piece of the collection - bought mostly for the publications that are no longer published...

read in small doses, but soak it in. this writing is astounding. my favorite story is "The Most Girl Part of You."