Peanut’ was a dazzling-and sometimes overly complicated-postmodern hall of mirrors, the stories in this volume are old-fashioned, almost O. What storyteller can claim mastery of the art if at least one critic doesn’t compare him to Flannery O’Connor, as Liz Colville did in The Daily? But Michiko Kakutani-a critic who cannot read a book by Adam Ross without doling out praise with one hand and snatching it back with the other, this time turning her review in The New York Times into yet another opportunity to lecture Ross about his world view-felt obligated to note Ross’s similarity to the writer whose very name appears on the highest honor the genre can bestow: “Whereas ‘Mr. Peanut but who loved Ladies and Gentlemen, compared Ross to both James Baldwin and Philip Roth before noting, again, the influence of the Raymonds: “He has managed to wed the masterful plotting of Raymond Chandler with the exquisite characterization of Raymond Carver, to prove once and for all that exhibiting a deep empathy for your characters deepens the thrill as they, and we, barrel toward their fates.” In The Boston Globe, Steve Almond, who didn’t much care for Mr. Daniel Roberts picked up the name-dropping baton in The Rumpus, noting Ross’s similarity to James Salter and, again, to Carver-and then aimed even higher: “Perhaps more than any other influence, Ross is working in the tradition of a story master like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who penned tales that were short but haunting.” Dean Bakopoulos, writing in The New York Times Book Review led off, noting that the book’s “embedded narratives arrive effortlessly, in a page from Chekhov’s playbook.” Bakopoulos then went on to compare Ross to Raymond Chandler, Italo Calvino, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver. In any case, critics have elevated Ross into extremely rarefied company indeed, starting with Chekhov, no less. Peanut (Knopf, 2010) and Ladies and Gentlemen (Knopf, 2011), should inspire the loftiest comparisons, for how often does a debut novelist rack up outrageous accolades in both translation and across the entire English-speaking world, including on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and then turn in an equally compelling performance with a short-story collection barely a year later?
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Perhaps it’s inevitable that Ross, who is the author of Mr. (photo from a blog for the course AAD 250 at like to compare Nashville novelist Adam Ross to other writers, and not to your average, everyday, ordinary writers, either. I guess that gives you an edge in writing stories like these. From what I’ve read about the author, he was a loner, an eccentric and a borderline misanthrope. In the title story, a man starts spitting words out into the sink with his toothpaste.Īs you might expect, these stories are very mixed in tone and quality. Several are low- or no-plot literary stories in which the author takes shots at the foolishness of literary prizes, literary conferences and critics. In The Eternal Province a man uses his prosthetic leg almost as a weapon to humiliate women. In Maria Giuseppa, a crazy man can’t stop himself from abusing his unattractive, simple-minded servant woman. For example, in The Provincial Night, a kids’ game at a small town party results in a real murder. Some stories I’ll call Alfred Hitchcock-like. A man has invented an inflatable woman with a Stepford-wife personality. Gogol’s Wife is perhaps the best-known story because that is the title story of another collection of his shorts.
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In the Kiss a timid bachelor is visited nightly by the ghost a beautiful spirit who starts sucking the life out of him with her kisses. But when she comes back as a mouse he decides he’s gotten used to having her dead and takes appropriate action. In Two Wakes, a man truly loved his dead wife. The bad news is that the horror is just beginning.Ĭhicken Fate is science fiction, a kind of Twilight Zone story of over-hormoned chickens turning the tables on the poultry breeders. Now he’s alive but inert, trapped in his coffin. Actually he goes into such a comatose state that he is presumed dead and given a funeral. The Labrenas (a type of lizard) is a Poe-like story in which a man who is terrified of the creatures gets one in his mouth and dies.
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Some are Poe-like, and some are science fiction in a style that reminds me of Twilight Zone. Twenty-four short stories divided by the publisher into fantastic, obsessive, dialogues, horrific, etc., so we can quibble about how each should be a different category.