Really a good writer. My favorite story is "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom" and the saddest part of that story is where she tells about "Bok Day" in South Korea, where they torture their dogs "to tenderize the meat" and eat hot stew made out of them. I would like to "tenderize" those people who do that to dogs, by electrocution. ( )

i am reading this because my favorite author, chuck palahniuk had a lot of wonderful things to say about amy hempel in his book 'nonfiction.' and he is right. she is an interesting read. minimalism. my favorite in the collection is 'breathing jesus.' her stories are short and precise but sometimes they can be enigmatic and you ask yourself what did that story mean? and you say maybe i'll reread it sometime. ( )

34. The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Forward Rick Moody
published: 2006
format: 412 page ARC Paperback
acquired: 2007 from a library book sale
read: May 29-Jun 14
rating: 4½

This is a collection of four books of stories:
- Reasons to Live (1985)
- At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990)
- Tumble Home (1997)
- The Dog of Marriage (2005)

"My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God." So entered Amy Hempel into the book world, a master of the line to the point of hyper-intense concision. Hempel was one of the great short story writers of the 1980's whose career went beyond the popularity of form. When short stories weren't selling so well the in the 1990's, she tried to transform into a longer form writer, coming out with only the 80-page story Tumble Home, a good illustration of why that's not her strength. It's a good story in the end, but the getting their requires the reader to move through numerous hyper-intense short outbursts all going different directions.

But in the short form she is a special voice, clever, fun, passive in complex and fascinating ways, and full of memorable lines, including wonderful opening lines (all hinted at in some of her titles). She can be sensual, but mostly she is scoffing and blessing at the same time all life's normal difficulties. Another gem that was languishing on the shelf way too long.

Mrs. Deane scans the written portion of my test. She says I skipped a question, the one that says, "Would you prefer to: (a) Think about your plans for tomorrow, (b) Think about what you would do if you had a million dollars, (c) Think about how it would feel to be held up at gunpoint?"

I say, "I want the job for the person who picks (b)."

2018
https://www.librarything.com/topic/288371#6511017 ( )

An incredible stylist, Hempel knows just how to craft that all-important first line* to draw you in, following it up with an equally powerful second and third and fourth... the lean sentences each so full of an untold story, but still so comfortably inhabiting the story they are telling.

Nowhere else is her trademark economy - those clipped, calculatedly idiosyncratic phrases - more controlled nor more impactful than in her first collection Reasons to Live** (which kept reminding me of Grace Paley). The remaining three collections eventually got looser, with some intriguing repetitions (which made me wonder about Hempel's life, what's her experience of living across a cemetery and male painters), but still had underline-worthy sentences and ideas.

*The story of how Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping - writing down metaphors on pieces of paper and putting them in a drawer and somehow they cohered into a story - always makes me wonder the order in which authors start a story. What came first, a concept, a scene, a theme, a sentence? For Hempel, I feel the sentences definitely came first and the story - if there is one - unfurled from there.

**Favourites from this collection: In a Tub, In the Cemetery Where All Johnson is Buried, Pool Night, The Man in Bogota. ( )

I've given this book away several times, each of them following a discussion on writers who craft sentences so delicious you can't help but go back and read them again, sometimes even mid-story. Hempel is a true wordsmith, and regardless of subject matter, her craft is incredible and an utter joy to take in. ( )