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celestriakle's review
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I ADORED this collection. Barbash excels at the specific type of story I love, where the story is ostensibly about one thing, but the actual story being told is about something else entirely. The emotions are all present, but never shared directly, and you the reader need to look to see it. The impressions of cold and loneliness and loss and grief are so strong in these stories. I really took my time with the collection, reading just one story at a time, so I could sit with it at the end. Ideal to read on a winter's morning.
bookishblond's review
5.0
I absolutely loved this little book. Barbash's stories are haunting and left me thinking about them deep into the night. Simply beautiful.
fwlichstein's review
3.0
Certainly not Raymond Carver but these short stories are an enjoyable way to spend an evening.
robdabear's review against another edition
5.0
I bought this on a whim while at the bookstore the other day, longing to read some sort of fiction that wasn't going to burden me past any overwhelming schoolwork I already have, and this seemed short and sweet. I've never heard of Tom Barbash, so I was interested and rather excited to read this collection of short stories, particularly because the cover and title of the collection was, for some unexplainable reason, attractive to me.
I have to say, "Stay Up With Me" (the book, not the story within) blew me away. Each short story, although most containing the same exact trends and peculiarities, explore the same topic in different ways, all of which in some way or another touched me and left me thinking long and hard about the difficulty we as humans struggle to understand…that of connection with others. It felt as though I could connect to every story in some way. I want to say that one particular story in the book stood out to me as my favorite, but every time I finished a story, I thought it was the one. And then I read the next story. And it was the one. And the next. And the next. There was only one story I didn't like, and that was mostly because certain description about an injury one of the characters suffered was making me nauseous, something I suppose you can contribute to Barbash's fantastic style of writing.
I'd definitely give this book a read, it was well worth it. Quick, too.
I have to say, "Stay Up With Me" (the book, not the story within) blew me away. Each short story, although most containing the same exact trends and peculiarities, explore the same topic in different ways, all of which in some way or another touched me and left me thinking long and hard about the difficulty we as humans struggle to understand…that of connection with others. It felt as though I could connect to every story in some way. I want to say that one particular story in the book stood out to me as my favorite, but every time I finished a story, I thought it was the one. And then I read the next story. And it was the one. And the next. And the next. There was only one story I didn't like, and that was mostly because certain description about an injury one of the characters suffered was making me nauseous, something I suppose you can contribute to Barbash's fantastic style of writing.
I'd definitely give this book a read, it was well worth it. Quick, too.
rahikh90's review
5.0
چه حس خوبی داشت خوندن کتاب
جالبه این کتاب رو کاملا تصادفی پیدا کردم و خریدم
کجا؟ وینرز
با مامان و بابا
مجموعه داستان کوتاهه
یکی از یکی زیبا تر
زیباییش توی توصیف عمق احساسات ادماست
پسر جوانی که به تازگی مادرش رو به سرطان از دست داده
و با پدرش هر کدوم به شیوه ی خودشون دارن با این غم عزاداری میکنن
It was the first time I understood there were a finite number of afternoons we’d have together. A hundred. Nighty nine. The next day it would be ninety-eight.
How he describes his mom’s worries about him:
She feared alternately that I would pursue success single-mindedly like my father or that I’d inherit her impractical intelligence, the kind that ensured the vibrancy of their social life but that only recently had earned her even a modest income.
Another story about a young girl who runs over a teenage girl and drives her to the hospital. The story of how she grapples with the pain from what she has caused to that little girl while her parents daydream about her bright future.
I really believe in the praise of New York times about the book: These stories should come with a warning: they might undo you.
Another favourite of mine: Paris
A journalist writing a piece on a small town about all the horrific things he saw during his short stay there.
When asking a fellow colleague about his input:
You’ve got people talking about incest and arson here. They all sound like drunks.
Him coming back judging that a fairly narrow read of the article.
And how in the end it is proven that you can never know the whole picture even though you claim to so.
The woman coming to him when leaving the town so he can meet her daughter, a national merit scholar, with a full scholarship to Notre Dame University, speaking French and Latin and growing up in this same city.
And the most painful of all, at least for me, the one I related with the most and touched me somewhere deep in my core: stay up with me, story of Henry
The pain which is caused when you love someone and yet you know you can't be with them
for whatever reason
you're not good for each other, you don't make it easy for one another
یا بساز و دونه دونه مرگ برگاتو ببین
یا بسوزو جنگلی رو شعله ور کن با خودت
نمی دونم چرا ولی منو یاد این اهنگ از سیاوش میندازه
یا میمونی و میسازی و دونه دونه مرگ برگاتو میبینی
یا اینکه دلتو میزنی به دریا
به جای مرگ اروم خودتو در جا اتیش میزنی
به یک باره میسوزی تا از نو متولد بشی
Henry hates the moment in which he wants her all over again, because it feels like regression, and so he treats her with a forged indifference, which he hopes will realign the balance of desire between them. They have far too much history to ever make this work, he thinks, but in certain moments, moments like this one, or on the occasional nights Alice decides to sleep over, he wonders. They are fluent in each other's faults and wounds and hypocrisies, and so sleeping together has the feel of sleeping with a failed part of themselves, like pornography with familiar dialogue.
"There's no one I'm closer to in the whole world than you, Henry."
"I feel the same," he says breezily, before realizing it might be true.
جالبه این کتاب رو کاملا تصادفی پیدا کردم و خریدم
کجا؟ وینرز
با مامان و بابا
مجموعه داستان کوتاهه
یکی از یکی زیبا تر
زیباییش توی توصیف عمق احساسات ادماست
پسر جوانی که به تازگی مادرش رو به سرطان از دست داده
و با پدرش هر کدوم به شیوه ی خودشون دارن با این غم عزاداری میکنن
It was the first time I understood there were a finite number of afternoons we’d have together. A hundred. Nighty nine. The next day it would be ninety-eight.
How he describes his mom’s worries about him:
She feared alternately that I would pursue success single-mindedly like my father or that I’d inherit her impractical intelligence, the kind that ensured the vibrancy of their social life but that only recently had earned her even a modest income.
Another story about a young girl who runs over a teenage girl and drives her to the hospital. The story of how she grapples with the pain from what she has caused to that little girl while her parents daydream about her bright future.
I really believe in the praise of New York times about the book: These stories should come with a warning: they might undo you.
Another favourite of mine: Paris
A journalist writing a piece on a small town about all the horrific things he saw during his short stay there.
When asking a fellow colleague about his input:
You’ve got people talking about incest and arson here. They all sound like drunks.
Him coming back judging that a fairly narrow read of the article.
And how in the end it is proven that you can never know the whole picture even though you claim to so.
The woman coming to him when leaving the town so he can meet her daughter, a national merit scholar, with a full scholarship to Notre Dame University, speaking French and Latin and growing up in this same city.
And the most painful of all, at least for me, the one I related with the most and touched me somewhere deep in my core: stay up with me, story of Henry
The pain which is caused when you love someone and yet you know you can't be with them
for whatever reason
you're not good for each other, you don't make it easy for one another
یا بساز و دونه دونه مرگ برگاتو ببین
یا بسوزو جنگلی رو شعله ور کن با خودت
نمی دونم چرا ولی منو یاد این اهنگ از سیاوش میندازه
یا میمونی و میسازی و دونه دونه مرگ برگاتو میبینی
یا اینکه دلتو میزنی به دریا
به جای مرگ اروم خودتو در جا اتیش میزنی
به یک باره میسوزی تا از نو متولد بشی
Henry hates the moment in which he wants her all over again, because it feels like regression, and so he treats her with a forged indifference, which he hopes will realign the balance of desire between them. They have far too much history to ever make this work, he thinks, but in certain moments, moments like this one, or on the occasional nights Alice decides to sleep over, he wonders. They are fluent in each other's faults and wounds and hypocrisies, and so sleeping together has the feel of sleeping with a failed part of themselves, like pornography with familiar dialogue.
"There's no one I'm closer to in the whole world than you, Henry."
"I feel the same," he says breezily, before realizing it might be true.
christinejschmidt's review
5.0
I am obsessed with this collection. I never wanted it to end. Keep writing, Tom Barbash!
kooltotoro's review against another edition
2.0
I quite like “The Break” and “Somebody’s Son”, one star each for them. The rest of the short stories are boring or forgettable or just plain weird. The writing was not bad, but I am afraid this book is not for me.
fictionfan's review
4.0
A good collection...
Tom Barbash's collection of 13 stories has been nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize. Each of the stories has one central viewpoint, sometimes given in third person and sometimes first. The main characters vary in age and gender but in almost every case they tend to be dealing with some form of loss - sometimes romantic loss, but often grief over the loss of a parent or a child. However that makes the collection sound more downbeat than it is. While some of the stories are quite moving, many of them are lifted by a touch of humour in the telling.
Although I've been reading a lot of short stories recently, it's still a form I struggle with. I'm aware of the fact that I like stories to have a plot – a beginning, middle and end – and that this isn't always the case with shorts. Barbash's stories are more in the form of character studies for the most part, and often seem to stop rather than end. This left me feeling dissatisfied with many of them, though my dissatisfaction was usually caused by the fact that the characters and situations had interested me and I wanted to see them taken through to a resolution. On the few occasions that the story came to some kind of firm conclusion, I found I enjoyed them a good deal, but with the rest I was left feeling a little let down – a clash between author's style and reader's preference, I think, rather than a real criticism of Barbash's skill.
There is a theme in many of them of dysfunctional relationships between parents and children, often with sexual jealousy thrown into the mix. So we have the mother who becomes obsessively jealous of her son's relationship with a waitress, and the father who finds himself having sexual feelings for his son's girlfriend. But there is always an added layer of depth, an examination of the cause behind these feelings, and this is the real interest of the story.
Here are a few that I particularly enjoyed – individually each of these would get a five-star rating from me:
Howling at the Moon – a tale of a young boy who had been the accidental cause of the death of his brother some years before, and the emotional distance this has caused between himself and his mother. Barbash leaves the guilt and grief skilfully understated, which I felt actually added to the emotional impact of this one.
Letters from the Academy – this is written as a series of letters from a tennis coach to the father of a young player about whom he has become obsessed. This is the most overtly humorous of the stories as we have to read between the lines of this man who clearly thinks his increasingly crazed behaviour is normal. Pete Sampras puts in a cameo appearance, which added a nice touch. And beneath the humour is a layer of pathos that gives the story some depth.
Paris – a tale of a newspaper man who does an expose of the poverty-ridden lives of the people of the run-down town of Paris (somewhere in America - not Paris, France). This one looks at how the journalist's own worthy motivations to highlight the blight that poverty causes blinded him to the effect of his article on the people he used. Quite different from the other stories in the book, very well written, and it made me wish that Barbash had tackled subjects like this more often.
The Women – told from the perspective of a teenage boy whose mother has died, this is the story of the different ways in which the boy and his father come to terms with their loss, and of the boy coming slowly to an adult realisation of why his father has dealt with it as he has. Again this story has a more complete resolution, and the characterisation of both father and son is excellent.
On the whole, the storytelling is done quite conventionally, but Barbash mixes it up stylistically occasionally by, for example, giving us one story written in the form of letters, and another written in the second person. I'm not a huge fan of stylistic tricks, but these worked well for the subject matter of each. The characterisation throughout is the main strength of the collection, ringing true even when the circumstances might easily have led to them becoming unbelievable or caricatured. The scenarios are more variable, some excellent but others too slight or too contrived to satisfy. However the majority of the stories are either good or excellent, with only a few that I would rate as no more than average. A good collection overall, then, and I would be interested to read one of Barbash's novels, since I suspect his writing would work better for me within the longer format.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Tom Barbash's collection of 13 stories has been nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize. Each of the stories has one central viewpoint, sometimes given in third person and sometimes first. The main characters vary in age and gender but in almost every case they tend to be dealing with some form of loss - sometimes romantic loss, but often grief over the loss of a parent or a child. However that makes the collection sound more downbeat than it is. While some of the stories are quite moving, many of them are lifted by a touch of humour in the telling.
Although I've been reading a lot of short stories recently, it's still a form I struggle with. I'm aware of the fact that I like stories to have a plot – a beginning, middle and end – and that this isn't always the case with shorts. Barbash's stories are more in the form of character studies for the most part, and often seem to stop rather than end. This left me feeling dissatisfied with many of them, though my dissatisfaction was usually caused by the fact that the characters and situations had interested me and I wanted to see them taken through to a resolution. On the few occasions that the story came to some kind of firm conclusion, I found I enjoyed them a good deal, but with the rest I was left feeling a little let down – a clash between author's style and reader's preference, I think, rather than a real criticism of Barbash's skill.
There is a theme in many of them of dysfunctional relationships between parents and children, often with sexual jealousy thrown into the mix. So we have the mother who becomes obsessively jealous of her son's relationship with a waitress, and the father who finds himself having sexual feelings for his son's girlfriend. But there is always an added layer of depth, an examination of the cause behind these feelings, and this is the real interest of the story.
Here are a few that I particularly enjoyed – individually each of these would get a five-star rating from me:
Howling at the Moon – a tale of a young boy who had been the accidental cause of the death of his brother some years before, and the emotional distance this has caused between himself and his mother. Barbash leaves the guilt and grief skilfully understated, which I felt actually added to the emotional impact of this one.
Letters from the Academy – this is written as a series of letters from a tennis coach to the father of a young player about whom he has become obsessed. This is the most overtly humorous of the stories as we have to read between the lines of this man who clearly thinks his increasingly crazed behaviour is normal. Pete Sampras puts in a cameo appearance, which added a nice touch. And beneath the humour is a layer of pathos that gives the story some depth.
Paris – a tale of a newspaper man who does an expose of the poverty-ridden lives of the people of the run-down town of Paris (somewhere in America - not Paris, France). This one looks at how the journalist's own worthy motivations to highlight the blight that poverty causes blinded him to the effect of his article on the people he used. Quite different from the other stories in the book, very well written, and it made me wish that Barbash had tackled subjects like this more often.
The Women – told from the perspective of a teenage boy whose mother has died, this is the story of the different ways in which the boy and his father come to terms with their loss, and of the boy coming slowly to an adult realisation of why his father has dealt with it as he has. Again this story has a more complete resolution, and the characterisation of both father and son is excellent.
On the whole, the storytelling is done quite conventionally, but Barbash mixes it up stylistically occasionally by, for example, giving us one story written in the form of letters, and another written in the second person. I'm not a huge fan of stylistic tricks, but these worked well for the subject matter of each. The characterisation throughout is the main strength of the collection, ringing true even when the circumstances might easily have led to them becoming unbelievable or caricatured. The scenarios are more variable, some excellent but others too slight or too contrived to satisfy. However the majority of the stories are either good or excellent, with only a few that I would rate as no more than average. A good collection overall, then, and I would be interested to read one of Barbash's novels, since I suspect his writing would work better for me within the longer format.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Simon & Schuster.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
bethreadsandnaps's review
4.0
The theme of loss permeates these short stories. I see the summary of these stories says they have humor, but I must be incredibly dense because I found very little humor in the stories. All were very strong; they had a vivid humanity. I wonder if the author has gone through a recent divorce because many of the stories were about divorce. Overall, great read!