Richard Butner

From the very beginning of this strange collection, I was enchanted.

There's an adorable awkwardness, and confident frailty, to many of Butner's characters here, and even when I began a story with one eyebrow raised or feeling a bit skeptical of where things were going, the turns and choices and progressions in nearly every story pulled me in to the individual world and reality...to the extent that I simply wanted the collection to keep right on going. The way Butner interweaves his own show more versions of reality and fantasy with characters who seem so real that we could know them is truly something wonderful, and it's easy to see why some of these stories were published in top magazines. But importantly, even the stories which were unpublished prior to this collection stand up to the standards set by others.

In the end, I'm left anxious to read more of his work, because even though some of these stories didn't quite make me fall in love with them like others did, even those that left me less than entralled showed such creativity and life that I didn't mind having read them. Some of my favorites from the collection are: "Scenes from the Renaissance", "Ash City Stomp", "Circa", "Delta Function", "Give Up", and "Sunnyside".

Absolutely recommended for lovers of weird fiction and SFF in short form. show less

I got turned on to this collection by a truly glowing review by Matthew Claxton in his Unsettling Futures newsletter, and I can confirm this book delivers. Sycamore Hill is an invite-only science fiction writer's workshop, the post-graduate version of Clarion and its ilk. Given that Bruce Sterling is my favorite living science-fiction author and I recognized a handful of names on the cover as heavy writers with big ideas and serious chops, I figured I'd give it a look.

I was really too young show more to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!

What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.

Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.

As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading! show less

From Small Beer Press and edited by the great Kelly Link, (which was all I needed to recommend this book of short stories to me). From the first page I was smiling at the turns of phrase. Here we have a sort of low-key punk nostalgia. A visit between old friends with a haunting jester... or is it Death's Fool? Another visit between old friends where one has to shut their eyes during the car ride so as not to see all those haunts that are now gone. Many middle-age folk who are visiting old show more friends and old towns with some sci-fi/fantasy elements sprinkled in there. These stories are labeled as "sci-fi/fantasy" but they stay in mostly realistic territory most of the time, while some might have a bit of sci-fi/fantasy twist to them. 'Horses Blow Up Dog City' reminds me of the film 'Until the End of the World' by Wim Wenders (a favorite) -- in the respect that both story and film are from the 90s that envision technology slightly in the future and are somehow eerily accurate. I will say that the blurb comparing this book to Sally Rooney is misleading and not helping Butner's book at all. I may have only read 'Normal People' but I really do not see how these books are similar other than that they both contain words. I'm afraid many people who pick up this book will expect a Rooney book and this is not that at all. I will say that I tend to pass on Rooney's books but I'm a fan of Butner's writing! (In my opinion, Butner is much better. As far as I know, Rooney's characters aren't old enough for this much change or nostalgia.) About one third of these stories have been published in other places and ten of the stories are published in this collection for the first time. I would say I very much enjoyed all of these stories except for maybe one story -- I didn't really understand the point. A couple stories I wish had a tiny bit more detail. Otherwise, a VERY solid collection. Usually I would list favorites, but it would be all of the stories minus the one. I just knew this collection had a certain sparkle when I heard about it. I do love a fun short story collection. Aging punks, this one's for you! show less

I only needed to know that this book came from Small Beer Press to know I wanted to read it, even though I hadn't previously read any of Richard Butner's work. The name of course, evokes editor and writer Kelly Link, whose prose style I absolutely love. Based on my affinity for Link's work, I took a chance on Butner, and I'm glad I did. His debut collection, The Adventurists is a short story collection carefully curated to leave the reader with a feeling of having touched upon something - show more the lives of the characters and their deepest longings, most inextricably bound to their histories. Some brush up against the speculative, though Butner rightly keeps his hand steady here. What emerges is a collection that feels like just that- a cohesive piece of storytelling that keeps you coming back for more. show less