The Bigness of the World wastes no time in establishing Ostlund as one of the new front-runners in Bay Area short fiction.
Insights that arrive too late fill these resonant tales—of abandoned lovers, neglected children, and travelers in foreign lands.
Lori Ostlund told an interviewer that short stories have always come natural to her. These precise explorations of longing and loss show that she is already a master of that demanding form.
Witty and sharp, Ostlund has crafted eleven surprising and often very funny tales that remind us just how vast the world really is.
These sly stories are funny and unpredictable and graced with priceless details you'll carry with you long after the last page is turned. Whether charting the loneliness of youth, or tracing the emotional upheavals of lovers abroad, Ostlund proves to be a wise, charming, and irresistible guide.
author of Music Through the Floor: Stories - Eric Puchner
The Bigness of the World is simply a stunning collection—every story jewel-crafted and resonant. I read stories to meet people I do not know and have not imagined, but even in that context Lori Ostlund’s people are unique. I begin by thinking that I know these characters or have known them. And then somewhere along the way, they shape-shift and startle me. Over and over again I find myself looking at the world from a fresh perspective—this sharp-eyed, compassionate writer’s rendering of the world I thought I knew. This is a book to remake our imaginary landscape—the kind of book I not only recommend, I advocate. Read this, I want to tell people. You need these stories. You do.
author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash - Dorothy Allison
Ostlund’s remarkable debut collection deftly navigates the treacherous shoals of decaying relationships in which the protagonists often escape to faraway lands in order to find themselves, or, at the very least, their partners. Fate, for the globe-trotting teacher-entrepreneur of “And Down We Went,” takes the form of an untimely bird dropping; in “Bed Death,” it is a Malay waitress who casually takes a sip of orange juice from the narrator’s glass. Ostlund’s artful prose is playfully complex and illuminating, evocative and unsentimental, as in “Upon the Completion of Baldness,” in which the narrator’s girlfriend returns home from a trip completely bald. Remarks the narrator, “the chilly desert air seemed to startle her as though, in that moment, she realized that there was a price to be paid for having no hair, and while I still said nothing, I was happy to see her suffer just a bit.” A specific disenchantment inhabits these stories—the disenchantment of the uncompromising romantic confronted with the evaporative nature of love. Each piece is sublime. (Oct.)
"Ostlund, whose work has been included in the Best American and also PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, is a writer to watch. She constantly delights the reader with the subtlety of her insights as well as the carefulness of her prose, as we find that beneath the comic observations of cultural misunderstanding, or a couple's quirky habits, lies a genuine melancholy—and the sense that while there is absurdity in reticence, there is sadness in it too."
Ostlund wields language in terribly complex ways building exceptional sentences, long and swollen with nuance and history, creating narratives that take the long way around. Each story holds a certain very smart wit that endears.”
The Bigness of the World is simply a stunning collection—every story jewel-crafted and resonant…This is a book to remake our imaginary landscape—the kind of book I not only recommend, I advocate. Read this, I want to tell people. You need these stories. You do.”
author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash Dorothy Allison
"There is no book I am happier to see getting a second life."
The Bigness of the World brings to mind the work of Flannery O'Connor and other Southern Gothic writers such as William Faulkner, Truman Capote and Carson McCullers...Like O'Connor, Ostlund enables us to step back from everyday life's banalities and see how completely we are estranged from each other—and connected to each other.
"Ostlund, whose work has been included in the Best American and also PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, is a writer to watch. She constantly delights the reader with the subtlety of her insights as well as the carefulness of her prose, as we find that beneath the comic observations of cultural misunderstanding, or a couple's quirky habits, lies a genuine melancholy—and the sense that while there is absurdity in reticence, there is sadness in it too."
Heartbreaking and wonderful.
author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls - Richard Russo
The Bigness of the World is simply a stunning collection—every story jewel-crafted and resonant. I read stories to meet people I do not know and have not imagined, but even in that context Lori Ostlund’s people are unique. I begin by thinking that I know these characters or have known them. And then somewhere along the way, they shape-shift and startle me. Over and over again I find myself looking at the world from a fresh perspective—this sharp-eyed, compassionate writer’s rendering of the world I thought I knew. This is a book to remake our imaginary landscape—the kind of book I not only recommend, I advocate. Read this, I want to tell people. You need these stories. You do."—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash
"These sly stories are funny and unpredictable and graced with priceless details you'll carry with you long after the last page is turned. Whether charting the loneliness of youth, or tracing the emotional upheavals of lovers abroad, Ostlund proves to be a wise, charming, and irresistible guide."—Eric Puchner, author of Music Through the Floor: Stories
"Witty and sharp, Ostlund has crafted eleven surprising and often very funny tales that remind us just how vast the world really is."—Booklist
"Ostlund’s artful prose is playfully complex and illuminating, evocative and unsentimental. . . . Each piece is sublime."—Publishers Weekly
"The Bigness of the World wastes no time in establishing Ostlund as one of the new front-runners in Bay Area short fiction."—San Francisco Magazine
"Insights that arrive too late fill these resonant tales--of abandoned lovers, neglected children, and travelers in foreign lands."—Coastal Living
"Lori Ostlund told an interviewer that short stories have always come natural to her. These precise explorations of longing and loss show that she is already a master of that demanding form."—Magill Book Reviews
"The characters in Ostlund's book are a picky breed, which is not to say they are unlikeable - to the contrary, they are so well-defined that the reader cannot help but find companionship in their annoyances, their frustrations, their search for meaning in a disparate world . . . The Bigness of the World is an impressive first collection, and I am excited to see what Lori Ostlund does next."—Kasey Pfab, The Corresponder
★ 2015-11-05
