|
Loading... ▾Recommendations LibraryThing recommendations▾Will you like it?
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
|
|
| Series (with order) |
|
| Canonical Title |
|
| Original publication date |
|
| People/Characters |
|
| Important places |
|
| Important events |
|
| Awards and honors |
|
| Epigraph |
|
| Dedication |
This book is for my sister and for my parents and for Benjamin  | |
|
| First words |
In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing. | |
|
| Quotations |
The stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Haagen-Dazs, rage. (four calling birds, three french hens) "Life is a long journey across a wide country," he said. "Sometimes the weather's good. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's so bad, your car goes off the road." (four calling birds, three french hens) "It's a myth, the high suicide rates around Christmas. It's the homicide rate that's high. Holiday homicide. All that time the family suddenly gets to spend together, and then bam, that eggnog." (four calling birds, three french hens) "He had limited notes to communicate his needs," she said. "He had his 'food' mew, and I'd follow him to his dish. He had his 'out' mew, and I'd follow him to the door. He had his 'brush' mew, and I'd go with him to the cupboard where his brush was kept. And then he had his existential mew, where I'd follow him vaguely around the house as he wandered in and out of rooms, not knowing exactly what or why." (four calling birds, three french hens) What was Christmas if not a giant mixed metaphor? What was it about if not the mysteries of interspecies love--God's for man! Love had sought a chasm to leap across and landed itself right here: the Holy Ghost among the barn animals, the teacher's pet sent to be adored and then to die. (four calling birds, three french hens) The body has only so many weeks of stage fright in it before it simply gives up and just goes out onstage. (beautiful grade) Truth be told, Bill is a little afraid of suicide. Taking one's life, he thinks, has too many glitzy things to offer: a real edge on the narrative (albeit retrospectively), a disproportionate philosophical advantage (though again, retrospectively), the last word, the final cut, the parting shot. Most importantly, it gets you the hell out of there, wherever it is you are, and he can see how such a thing might happen in a weak but brilliant moment, one you might just regret later while looking down from the depthless sky or up through two sandy anthills and some weeds. Still, Lina is the one he finds himself thinking about, and carefully dressing for in the morning--removing all dry-cleaning tags and matching his socks. (beautiful grade) This taboo regarding age is to make us believe that life is long and actually improves us, that we are wiser, better, more knowledgeable later on than early. It is a myth concocted to keep the young from learning what we really are and despising and murdering us. We keep them sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to them that there is something more than regret and decreptitude up ahead. (beautiful grade) Why not admit history's powers to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer thanthe new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all. (beautiful grade) Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-kew way, formless and self-consuming. Modest is how he sometimes likes to see it. No one is modest anymore. Everyone exalts their disappointments. They do ceremonious battle with everything; they demand receipts and take their presents back--all the unhappy things that life awkwardly, stupidly, without thinking, without bothering even to get to know them a little or to ask around! has given them. They bring it all back for an exchange. (beautiful grade) "I would be a genius now [...] if only I'd memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu." (what you want to do fine) But ultimately, it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath. (what you want to do fine) "There's something that with time grows between people," he said once, in an attempt to keep them together [...] "Something that grows whether you like it or not." "Gunk," Annie said. "What?" "Gunk!" she shouted. "Gunk grows between people!" (what you want to do fine) They have brought along the game Trivial Pursuit, and at night Quilty likes to play. Though Mack complies--if that's what you want to do, fine--he thinks it's a dumb game. If you don't know the answer, you feel stupid. And if you do know the answer, you feel just as stupid. More stupid. What are you doing with that stupid bit of information in your brain? (what you want to do fine) There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you. Something exhilarating even: having your chins over each other's shoulders, your feet touching, your heads pressed ear-to-ear. (what you want to do fine) | |
|
| Last words |
Out over the Sfondrata chapel tower, where the fog had broken, she thought she saw a single star, like the distant nose of a jet; there were people in the clayey clouds. She turned, and for a moment it seemed they were all there in Martin's eyes, all the absolving dead in residence in his face, the angel of the dead baby shining like a blazing creature, and she went to him, to protect and encircle him, seeking the heart's best trick, _oh, terrific heart._ "Please, forgive me," she said. And he whispered, "Of course. It is the only thing. Of course." (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
|
| Disambiguation notice |
|
| Publisher's editors |
|
| Blurbers |
|
▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (2)
▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions
Lorrie Moore made her debut in 1985 with Self-Help, which proved that she could write about sadness, sex, and the single girl with as much tenderness--and with considerably more wit--than almost any of her contemporaries. She followed this story collection with another, Like Life, as well as two fine novels, Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Yet Moore's rapid-fire alternation of mirth and deep melancholy is so perfectly suited to the short form that readers will greet Birds of America with an audible sigh of relief--and delight. In "Willing," for example, a second-rate Hollywood starlet retreats into a first-rate depression, taking shelter in a Chicago-area Days Inn. The author's eye for the small comic detail is intact: her juice-bar-loving heroine initially drowns her sorrows in "places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet." Yet Moore seldom satisfies herself with mere pop-cultural mockery. She's too interested in the small and large devastations of life, which her actress is experiencing in spades. "Walter leaned her against his parked car," Moore relates. "His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There was something numb and on hold in her. There were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling." Elsewhere, the author serves up a similar mixture of one-liners and contemporary grief, lamenting the death of a housecat in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens" and the death of a marriage in "Which Is More Than I Can Say About That." And her hilarious account of a nuclear family undergoing a meltdown in "Charades" will make you want to avoid parlor games for the rest of your natural life. --James Marcus (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) (see all 2 descriptions) ▾Open Shelves Classification The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
 Google Books — Loading...
|
)
)
)
)
