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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, βI scan the tables of contents of magazines, looking for Antonya Nelson's name, hoping that she has decided to bless us again.β 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, βFunny Once,β a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In βThe Village,β 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 sonβs relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella βThree Wishes,β siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brotherβs 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 Americaβs best short story writers.
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