Lydia Peelle

WOW!!! "Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing," is the best short story collection that I have ever read. Eight perfect, largely elegiac stories of lost eras and passing youth. Set primarily in vivid Southern landscapes where passions run hot and emotion often times run cold.

"Mule Killers" transports us back to an era, not that long ago, when an old farmer reluctantly faces the facts and decides to replace his working mules with tractors. In "Sweethearts of the Rodeo," two young girls show more spend the summer, their last one before boys, working at a stable, riding their ponies recklessly, and harassing the stable manager Lothario. "The Still Point" has a sad young man travelling the carnival circuit, where he makes his living selling the comic book collection of his dead twin brother. In the title story a young woman meets a herpetologist on a bus during the holidays and uses him and his laboratory as a sanctuary from her broken marriage. In "This is not Love" a mother is reminded by a photograph of a summer spent with a troubled man on a houseboat.

The remaining three stories are, if I can possibly say this, my favorites. The "Kidding Season: tells the complex and nuanced story of a troubled young man on his way to a warmer climate who is hired by a woman to help her on her very modest sheep ranch. Good and bad continually struggle inside this young man. He flirts with salvation, but never quite makes it. "Shadow on a Weary Land," evokes the legend that Jesse James' brother Frank had buried a lot of money just before he was killed in the mountain ridges north of Nashville, TN. Now a race is on between a group of rapscallions left over from the 1960's who are looking for the treasure and the encroachment of urban development.

Finally, "Phantom Pain" is a wonderful story about a divorced, one-legged, taxidermist who has to contend with an ex-wife, an incompetent assistant and a town gone batty with the rumor of a cougar, long thought extinct in the area, loose in the surrounding hills.

Lydia Peelle writes about things that I want to read and in a voice that I want to hear. What better compliment could I possibly give her. This collection is astonishing, exemplary, wonderful or any other possible superlative adjective that one could possibly come up with.

My only problem with the book has nothing to do with the exquisite writing of Ms. Peelle, but rather with Harper Collins for publishing it as a paperback. It is not as if Ms.Peelle was a complete unknown. She was already a critically acclaimed writer with an O. Henry Prize and two Pushcart Prizes to her credit. And just last week was selected by the National Book Foundation as one of the honorees of the "5 under 35" award as further recognition of her immense talent. I would just have preferred the durability and beauty of a hardback, because I loved the book so much. So I purchased three paperback copies as "insurance" against damage and deterioration. This being the case, perhaps Harper Collins is much more astute than I initially thought. show less

I struggled to get through this book, likely because I'm not that much of a horse person and I didn't find the two main male characters to be entirely likable. I did enjoy the book's atmospheric setting - the last days of the American west filled with horse traders and people seeking new beginning - and the perspective of ordinary Americans has the country became embroiled in the first world war. A good book, but just not for me.

I'm going against my policy here, and reviewing a book which I did not finish. The short stories in this collection share a good many qualities, for better and for worse. They all show that Ms. Peelle can draw a scene and a character with high skill. Her language is economical and slanted at just the right pitch. This group displays the author's skills in this area.

However, her theme of extreme existential angst runs through all the stories, too. The author gives each hero (of the pieces I show more read) a tiny ultimate glimpse of escape, but that was quite uniform through all the stories, too. When I started the eponymous piece, and the hero was another just waiting for his life, or the world, or both, to end cataclysmically, while he is all alone and miserable, I gave up. It was too much of the same thing, over which I didn't need to dawdle. show less

One of the National Book Foundations "5 Under 35"

Indisputably excellent stories. I read one or two at a time over the better part of a year. The problem with short stories is that they are harder to remember, because, as a reader, you spend less time with a story than a novel, and that's less time for the characters to get under your skin and into your brain - which Peele's characters absolutely do. I think the ones I will remember longest are the first story ("Mule Killers") and the title show more story.

Quotes

We watch them, and the rules that have been strung in our heads like thick cables fray and unravel in a dazzling arc of sparks. -from Sweethearts of the Rodeo, p. 57

But there's a danger to picturing a place without you in it. After a while you can start to feel like nothing at all. -from The Still Point, p. 75

It flashed past with a ringing in my ears, left me staggering with irrelevance. -p. 81

...as if he can buy his way back to a beginning. -from Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, p. 99

We say the same things we always do, slicing back through the scar tissue in one another's heart. -p. 101

When people talk about the South being haunted, it's true. But it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. -from This is Not a Love Story, p. 121

It exhausts me to think about it, even now. Like trying to hold a drowning man's head above water. -p. 126

"...and it takes years off my life. Years. No matter how hard you work, it's a gamble and the house always wins." -from Kidding Season, p. 151

I imagine he doesn't play music anymore for the same reason I don't do drugs anymore: you can only push up to the edge so many times before you realize the one thing on the other side is your own mortality, with no one waiting there to keep your grave clean. -from Shadow on a Weary Land, p. 165

My mind, before I ruined it, was a beautiful thing. -p. 166

Every mammal on earth, I've read, from mouse to man to mammoth, goes through roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. -p. 171 show less