All Things, All at Once

by Abbott, Lee K.

• ISBN13: 9780393061376
• ISBN10: 039306137X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-06-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

"Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer."--William Harrison Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations--common heartbreak, fractured families--and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.

Author Biography

Lee K. Abbott is a professor of creative writing at Ohio State University

Table of Contents

Ninety Nights on Mercury	3	(17)
As Fate Would Have It	20	(15)
Category Z	35	(11)
Dreams of Distant Lives	46	(7)
Gravity	53	(22)
How Love Is Lived in Paradise	75	(17)
Love Is the Crooked Thing	92	(12)
Martians	104	(9)
Men of Rough Persuasion	113	(12)
One of Star Wars, One of Doom	125	(22)
Revolutionaries	147	(16)
Sweet Cheeks	163	(13)
The Eldest of Things	176	(10)
The End of Grief	186	(15)
The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance	201	(12)
The Talk Talked Between Worms	213	(35)
The Human Use of Inhuman Beings	248	(18)
The Valley of Sin	266	(8)
The View of Me from Mars	274	(8)
The Way Sin Is Said in Wonderland	282	(33)
The Who, the What, and the Why	315	(12)
What Y Was	327	(6)
When Our Dream World Finds Us, and These Hard Times Are Gone	333	(9)
X	342