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Loading... The First Honeymoon: New and Selected Stories (edition 2015)by Lyn Coffin (Author)
Work InformationThe First Honeymoon: New and Selected Stories by Lyn Coffin
None No current Talk conversations about this book.  IamAleem | Apr 21, 2017 |    This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.Now, to content that's actually content. Ups and downs. Some stories I thought clever -- Fable for instance, with every sentence getting its own moral. Others were those what is real? what is imagined? style stories that simply don't turn my crank. Most stories were short and sweet, seventeen of them gently placed into 163 pages. The stories are airy, some no more than an idea let loose onto the page. That's fine. Sometimes wisps are all that's required. Most aren't about youth, the way so many stories and books and movies and plots assume that all we lose the ability to care about those who aren't under the age of thirty-one. People are in their fifties, in some of these stories, people are on their third marriages, someone bred peacocks (so we aren't devoid of quirk). When I write stories, I feel they are like Coffin's: a tiny bit out of sync somehow that I'm not talented enough to articulate. Things are there, but it feels like a morsel without the ability to stretch into a meal. I like them though, for what little that's worth. The First Honeymoon by Lyn Coffin went on sale March 29, 2015. I received a copy free from Librarything in exchange for an honest review. (  ) reluctantm | Jul 31, 2016 | This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.In the best of these, Lyn Coffin has mastered the inferred narrative - she's not storytelling in her stories, but giving us the characters, feelings, and settings that led the narrative she isn't writing down to the place where we join it. It gives us enough of these stories' souls to learn the full story, to teach it to ourselves, and even extend it, all in a surprisingly short time in language allusive and elusive. The Gift Horse, The Psychiatrist's Second Wife, and The First Honeymoon each offer a novel in concentrated format, and in these and others along these lines, death, intimacy, and flat-out sexual tension play big roles in giving us what we need as readers to learn lives in short order. Other stories in the collection could be accused of the 'too clever by half' stories, based on some surprise conceit, but for all that, I enjoyed them. When somebody clever shows off, and is good at it, the ride is fun: fireworks may not last, but damned if they're not pretty to look at in the moment. The Butterfly, which evolves from what seems like a prose poem to, maybe, something longer than flash fiction but not much, actually fooled me twice in that short span - and I enjoyed it all the more. Ranging from uncomfortably, darkly beautiful to clever romp, the stories in this collection are worth the time to read, and worth time between each story before starting the next. ( ) buffalopoet | Nov 16, 2015 | This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Moppette | Aug 24, 2015 | This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. ) EvelynBernard | Aug 24, 2015 | no reviews | add a review
In this extraordinary collection, Lyn Coffin writes with heart of longing and searching-for place, for connection, for love. Here, among these 17 stories, an artichoke reveals for a young bride the fault lines already dooming her new marriage; a mother makes final amends for telling an unwelcome truth about Christmas by telling a comforting lie about death; a young girl navigates the madness of her mother, the possible evil of her father and questions about her own state of mind; and we are treated to an inspired retelling of the classic Tortoise and the Hare fable. Coffin's fictions cross boundaries; they are funny, ominous and heartbreakingly true. "Sexy, smartly engaging and quirkily off-beat, these stories are a delight toread and ponder." - Judith Roche, National Book Award-Winning Author of Wisdom of the Body "Like Oates, like Updike, Coffin gives us characters we recognize, in spaces that are familiar-a coffee shop, a bar. She masterfully reveals the small yet extraordinary moments which eventually become irrevocable fate. Fiction worth re-reading: witty, wise, deeply imagined." - Jed Myers, Author of Watching the Perseids From the Editor These stories defy our expectations about how stories should come to us, how they should act. These stories have the feel of events into which we have tumbled unwittingly-at times, as though, at a restaurant, we were looking for the bathroom and stumbled into a banquet room hosting a family reunion and one person after another mistakes us for family and begins speaking to us, at other times as though we've broken into an apartment and are rifling through private correspondence, completely taken in by the intimacy and the urgency in the language of what we've found. Simply put, Iron Twine Press wanted to publish these stories because they are not like any stories we've read before. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumLyn Coffin's book The First Honeymoon: New and Selected Stories was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
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She has given us a surprisingly solid work of fiction here in this fine collection!
Some stories are very charming while others are quite dramatic and moving.
I will need to revisit this book soon. (