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Bloomsbury USA
June 2014
On Sale: May 20, 2014
304 pages
ISBN: 1620408619
EAN: 9781620408612
Kindle: B00J5ED98M
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
Michael Chabon once said, “I scan the tables of contents of
magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that
she has decided to bless us again.” And now she has blessed
us again, with a bounty of the stories for which she is so
beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed, hard-edged, beautifully
formed. In the title story, “Funny Once,” a couple held
together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more
responsible friends. In “The Village,” a woman visits her
father at a nursing home, recalling his equanimity at her
teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own
past indiscretions. In another, when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes
missing, a mother worries increasingly about her teenage
son’s relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the
novella “Three Wishes,” siblings muddle through in the
aftermath of their elder brother’s too-early departure from
the world. The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of
Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there
is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with
the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where
to stop for the night. These characters are aging,
regretting actions both taken and not, inhabiting their
extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once,
their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed
by one of America’s best short story writers.
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