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Loading... Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009)by Wells Tower
2000s decade (110) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 3.5 couple of good stories/some good lines ( ) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned certainly lives up to its title. Wells Tower’s collection of stories is nearly all about people whose lives have been blighted by fallings-out with family or loved ones. Most of the stories are about a particular incident, and usually end with no resolution, and not even a suggestion of a hopeful outcome. You sometimes sense an ellipsis lurking behind his endings; there is more to this, but he’s not sharing it. Characters have little back-story, which is fair enough in a short story, but it leads them to be a little one-dimensional. One story I did like was In the Show about a single night in a funfair. It’s full of incident with quite a few characters getting attention, and more background filled in than Tower usually gives us. It’s stronger as a result, but still has a little bit of that ellipsis lurking at the end. The eponymous story is the last in the collection and unusual in that it is a piece of historical fiction rather than set in the contemporary USA. It’s a story about some Viking raiders setting out on a voyage to pillage Lindisfarne. It’s an interesting idea for a story, and I was getting quite engaged until Tower fatally marred it with risible anachronisms like “gung-ho motherf***er” and “hassle”. There’s no excuse for horrible writing like that, and both Tower and his editors should hang their collective heads in shame. Since I really only enjoyed one story in this collection, I can’t say I recommend it particularly. Maybe others might get ore out of Tower’s writing than I did. I think his stories lack the humour and style that might lift them above the pack in the manner of, say, Tony Birch. Instead, he has just written a collection of very downbeat, sometimes silly stories that would only appeal to somebody who needs a darn good depressing. This was a pretty exquisite book of short stories. Very short stories: Stories that would ferry you to far-off narrative islands, leave you to rummage around in the thickets of their characters' lives, and then suddenly drop the earth off from under your feet and catapult you onto the next adventure. I would be extremely invested in one character / setting / story / narrative ascent, waiting on the edge of my seat for the culmination of tension, for the characters' relationships to somehow come to a head, and then I would turn the page, and it would all end. Wells Tower has a lovely way with words and with dialogue; realistic, tinged with wit, imbuing his characters with a rooted sense of their worlds. Each character reveled in their own unique set of inadequacies. (Especially memorable: The brothers in the forest, the girl in the river, and, of course, the Vikings.)
El primer libro de Wells Tower, Todo arrasado, todo quemado, ha maravillado a la crítica estadounidense, que no ha dudado en calificarlo como uno de los mejores debuts literarios de los últimos tiempos. Medios como el New York Times, el New York Observer o el Publishers Weekly se han apresurado a dedicar páginas a este joven autor que, con tan solo un libro, ya ha sido comparado a escritores de la talla de John Cheever o Raymond Carver. Ahora el lector español puede disfrutar de estos relatos que, protagonizados por personajes a la deriva y escritos con humor e ingenio, muestran el portentoso talento de este ya imprescindible autor. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
A collection of darkly comic short works includes the stories of a man who is thrown out of his house when his wife discovers his infidelity in a bizarre way, teen cousins who share a woodland comeuppance, and a youth who flees to a carnival life after being bitten by his father. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumWells Tower's book Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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