I loved these stories! The characters are really well drawn, and they are funny. The stories are just on the edge of being too weird, but have that rollicking quality like you find in Confederacy of Dunces. The book is really funny, the writing is great, and the ideas behind the stories are really original and varied. Loved this book. ( )

If you like short stories this is a fine collection from a very talented writer.
Most take place in the south, and are about people down on their luck, or completely out of luck.
( )

Tim Gautreaux's writing is refreshingly straightforward. His stories accumulate one detail after another, with such a gripping attention to each perfect observation, one after another, that I accept these stories as fact as I read.

Gautreaux's characters are working-class tragic--not in the 'heroic working man' tradition of Steinbeck, though, because they never slip into archetype; Gautreaux's characters instead always remain deeply individual. His characters remain tiny, and flawed, and trapped in frequently horrific circumstances; and yet even so, somehow they reflect a philosophy where each individual deserves our compassion and understanding.

There is such a steady, unerring stream of terrific but entirely unornamented prose here that it's easy to forget how hard it is to write this way. So much of contemporary American fiction is exaggerated or inflated or excessively hysterical or heavily ornamented in some way, where characters are out-sized and unrealistic, that I've tuned out, a little, how writing doesn't always need to be fortissimo. Reading this collection was like coming home to a place that I'd forgotten existed.

For people not familiar w. Gautreaux, here is a link to a story, SHEEP, that is -not- in this collection, but is made available online from The Atlantic magazine, and was originally published by the great fiction editor Michael Curtis:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/06/sheep/377645/

I highly recommend Gautreaux's collection, along with everything else he ever published.

Also, everyone should subscribe to the Atlantic, just on principle. ( )

If you like short stories this is a fine collection from a very talented writer.
Most take place in the south, and are about people down on their luck, or completely out of luck. ( )