This book seemed to take a really long time to read (for me anyway) since my schedule has become a bit more hectic recently, but I always enjoyed returning to it when I could grab a minute. It didn't evoke in me that rabid urge to rush through it, to devour it as soon as I could. It felt to me like an old friend. In fact, that's what the stories became for me--like listening to a close friend spill their guts. There was something very gratifying about this collection. None of the characters or situations were extraordinary. These were not wacky situations or wild instances where BAM! the character is forever changed. Instead, they all faced (mostly) everyday challenges and ordinary tragedies with varying degrees of success (or lack thereof), and their own revelations were perhaps just a subtle quarter-turn in a new direction...the way life usually happens. They all had their endearing aspects as well as those traits that made me cringe, also reminding me of when you start to see faults in a beaming new friendship or relationship...those moments that make you face up to the decision whether or not you wish to forge ahead. This was the "realest" writing I've read in a while and makes me feel at ease with the fact that life keeps on keepin' on. I was unaware of Nelson as a writer before now, but as I now see she's had a full career so far, I will absolutely be seeking out more of her work. ( )

Short attension span theatre review: 4 stars

Strengths: Strong, broken characters

Weaknesses, the author has an overuse of words--she uses too much inside a sentence, one or two adjectives too many. Odd criticism.

While Ms. Nelson's stories are interesting, they are also complicated. This is one author who weaves action with subtext in a skillful way.

4 stars.

Terry Banker ( )

Antonya Nelson’s people are broken, flawed in some fundamental way that seems perfectly normal to them: A 17-year-old girl who thinks pregnancy is a way of breaking her bad habits; a college student who lies her way into a professor’s family Christmas party so she can make a pass at his wife; the young man whose fantasy connection to a family leads him to use their summer house when they’re away. That their strangeness inevitably leads them to trouble is something they take in stride. In the end, people they meet, and Nelson’s readers, are left feeling sorry for them, and a little bemused.
Nelson leads us through the stories in her new collection, Nothing Right, without passing judgment on her characters. Instead, she throws in an occasional wry observation. “Every one of Mona’s relationships ended without her permission,” she writes of a woman who enlists her sister to persuade her married lover to stay in the relationship. In a tangled love affair, a straying husband tells his mistress, “I want to tell you about my wife,” and then muses that he “never knew when he was going to upset her” when she stops telephoning.
There is a real charm to these people, a sense that we’ve known them or that they are in many ways like us. The alcoholic who “drove around reciting the alphabet backward, in anticipation of a DWI arrest” is an archetype; the traveling woman who picks up the same man in a bar after five years without recognizing him reflects the fragmentation of many peoples’ relationships.
Not all of the strangeness is bad. A teenage girl’s disappearance, which shakes up her hugely dysfunctional family, results from a good deed, and no harm done.
This is a collection to read with a smile, and to revisit when you need another one. ( )

Antonya Nelson has the ability to make the mundane extraordinary. So many sentences made me wonder how I could not have seen the world in just that way before. Her attention to detail is awe inspiring.

These stories on their own, cannot be anything less than exquisite, but as a collection, I wonder if there was not a sameness to them that left me feeling like I was ready to be done.
Had I run into one in a literary magazine, or some other place I would have surely wanted more, but instead I had more than my fill.

In almost every story there was a lonely, disenfranchised protagonist and a list of people that should understand but don't. Beautifully drawn circles held me to the place, but after a while that place felt a bit too familiar.

Still, as a lover of the short story form, I cannot say that I was disappointed. ( )

Antonya Nelson's short stories are at once pointed and universal, each character reminding the reader of someone specific she knows but who also seems to represent the most broad characteristics of the human condition. Nelson creates impressively three-dimensional pictures which feel somehow tragic and hopeful, realist and optimistic. These stories hold up among the very best because these complexities stick in the mind long after the book has been put away. ( )