The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel, Rick Moody (Introduction)

Overview

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel gathers together the complete work of a writer whose voice is as singular and astonishing as any in American fiction. Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.

When Reasons to Live, Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in The Chicago Tribune called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage. As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, "The Dog of the Marriage, the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact."
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416546030
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	12/29/2006
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	517,109
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Amy Hempel is the author of Sing to It, The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed.  Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including Best American Short Stories and The Best Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College, and at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives near New York City.

Rick Moody is the author of the award-winning memoir The Black Veil, the novels Hotels of North America, The Four Fingers of Death, The Diviners, Purple America, The Ice Storm, Garden State, and multiple collections of short fiction. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Rhode Island.

Read an Excerpt

BEACH TOWN

The house next door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots. Their music at night was loud, and I liked it; it was not music I knew. Mornings, I picked up the empties they had lobbed across the hedge, Coronas with the limes wedged inside, and pitched them back over. We had not introduced ourselves these three months.

Between our houses a tall privet hedge is backed by white pine for privacy in winter. The day I heard the voice of a woman not the wife, I went out back to a spot more heavily planted but with a break I could just see through. Now it was the man who was talking, or trying to — he started to say things he could not seem to finish. I watched the woman do something memorable to him with her mouth. Then the man pulled her up from where she had been kneeling. He said, "Maybe you're just hungry. Maybe we should get you something to eat."

The woman had a nimble laugh.

The man said, "Paris is where you and I should go."

The woman asked what was wrong with here. She said, "I like a beach town."

I wanted to phone the wife's office in the city and hear what she would sound like if she answered. I had no fellow feeling; all she had ever said to me was couldn't I mow my lawn later in the day. It was noon when she asked. I told her the village bylaws disallow mowing before seven-thirty, and that I had waited until nine. A gardener, hired by my neighbor, cared for their yard. But still I was sure they were neglecting my neighbor's orchids. All summer long I had watched for the renters to leave the house together so that I could let myself in with the key from the shelf in the shed and test the soil and water the orchids.

The woman who did not want to go to Paris said that she had to leave. "But I don't want you to leave," the man said, and she said, "Think of the kiss at the door."

Nobody thinks about the way sound carries across water. Even the water in a swimming pool. A week later, when her husband was away, the wife had friends to lunch by the pool. I didn't have to hide to listen; I was in view if they had cared to look, pulling weeds in the raspberry canes.

The women told the wife it was an opportunity for her. They said, "Fair is fair," and to do those things she might not otherwise have done. "No regrets," they said, "if you are even the type of person who is given to regret, if you even have that type of wistful temperament to begin with."

The women said, "We are not unintelligent; we just let passion prevail." They said, "Who would deny that we have all had these feelings?"

The women told the wife she would not feel this way forever. "You will feel worse, however, before you feel better, and that is just the way it always is."

The women advised long walks. They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would all be fools to expect it.

The weekend the couple next door had moved in — their rental began on Memorial Day — I heard them place a bet on the moon. She said waxing, he said waning. Days later, the moon nearly full in the night sky, I listened for the woman to tell her husband she had won, knowing they had not named the terms of the bet, and that the woman next door would collect nothing.

The Dog of the Marriage copyright © 2005 by Amy Hempel

Table of Contents

	On Amy Hempel	xi
	Reasons to Live
	In a Tub	3
	Tonight Is a Favor to Holly	5
	Celia Is Back	13
	Nashville Gone to Ashes	17
	San Francisco	27
	In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried	29
	Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep	41
	Going	53
	Pool Night	57
	Three Popes Walk into a Bar	63
	The Man in Bogota	73
	When It's Human Instead of When It's Dog	75
	Why I'm Here	81
	Breathing Jesus	85
	Today Will Be a Quiet Day	89
	At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
	Daylight Come	101
	The Harvest	103
	The Most Girl Part of You	111
	Rapture of the Deep	123
	Du Jour	129
	Murder	133
	The Day I Had Everything	139
	To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O'Hare	149
	And Lead Us Not into Penn Station	153
	In the Animal Shelter	157
	At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom	159
	The Lady Will Have the Slug Louie	169
	Under No Moon	171
	The Center	177
	Tom-Rock Through the Eels	181
	The Rest of God	191
	Tumble Home
	Weekend	199
	Church Cancels Cow	201
	The Children's Party	203
	Sportsman	209
	Housewife	221
	The Annex	223
	The New Lodger	229
	Tumble Home	233
	Notes	302
	The Dog of the Marriage
	Beach Town	305
	Jesus Is Waiting	309
	The Uninvited	317
	Reference #388475848-5	337
	What Were the White Things?	343
	The Dog of the Marriage	347
	The Afterlife	367
	Memoir	373
	Offertory	375
	Notes	404

Editorial Reviews

Hempel's four collections of short fiction are all masterful; while readers await the follow-up to last year's acclaimed The Dog of the Marriage, this compendium restores the full set to print. The first of Hempel's books, Reasons to Live (1985), is justly celebrated by Rick Moody in his preface as a landmark of its era's "short-story renaissance"; it introduces Hempel's unmistakable tone, where a "besieged consciousness," Moody says, hones sentences to bladelike sharpness "to enact and defend survival." The second, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), is the main reason to buy this book: used copies are scarce, and the collection contains stories like "The Harvest." Hempel's genius, whether in first or third person, is to make her characters' feelings completely integral to the scenes they inhabit; her terse descriptions become elegantly telegraphic-and telepathic-reportage, with not a word wasted and not a single fact embellished. Her great subject is the failure of human coupling, and she charts it at every stage: giddy beginnings, sexy thick-of-its, wan (or violent) outcomes, grim aftermaths. Seeing it laid out kaleidoscopically in this volume is an awesome thing indeed, and a pleasure lovers of the short story will not want to deny themselves. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"It’s a given that someday a major world religion will arise from this book. It will become a religious text for our descendants, and millions will burn candles around statues of Ms. Hempel. She is a wonder. Honestly, each time you read this book it shortens your time in Purgatory and speeds your eventual salvation." —Chuck Palahniuk, for The New York Post

"This could be a very short review. Read this book. These stories are...always original and perfectly expressed." — New York Times Book Review

"The literary event of the year." — The Village Voice

"Amy Hempel's dazzling wit and exquisite use of language are impossible to disclaim." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Hempel is unique. Her word-by-word virtuosity is off the charts; her artistic evolution is phenomenal." — Chicago Tribune

"Hempel has established herself among the strongest voices in American fiction.... Hers is the work of a brave, unflinching mind.... Her prose conveys a world stripped to its essences." — Los Angeles Times

"Over and over again, Hempel pulls out life's pathos so concisely, so extraordinarily, and yet underneath it all is affirmation.... In short, Hempel makes you into a better reader." — San Francisco Chronicle

"A veritable cosmos of revelations is in reach in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel." — Chicago Tribune

"Few fiction writers are as intensely admired by their peers as is Hempel.... Hempel's is a hard-boiled sensibility, and each of her stories will leave the reader shaken." — The Atlantic Monthly

"As gripping as any novel...Tart, shimmering fables of passion." — The New York Observer

From the Publisher