Delights and surprises await the reader in this rich gathering of "Shorts" (ranging from several paragraphs to 2,000 words). From Diane Ackerman's fascination with hummingbirds to Andrei Codrescu's idiosyncratic view of nostalgia to Albert Goldbarth's free-wheeling riff on the universe, each Short becomes a sharply focused lens on an outer world or an inner sensibility.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Enjoyable.:
Here's my quibble, and it's a quibble against the genre more than this book: I'm not sure how I feel about the 'short'. (I know, so why'd I buy the dang book?) Part of me distrusts the genre as pandering to the ever-shrinking attention spans of our culture. We get our news in disconnected soundbytes, the average news story is 30 seconds long...you know the 'crabby old timer' diatribe. So, I'm ambivalent about the genre. That being said, this is a great book. It has consoled me that not everything short... more info
A Never-Ending Parade of Lightweights:
I can't figure out why the editors and publishers of this volume are claiming it to be a celebration of a new art form. Brief creative nonfiction? Hardly. Some of the pieces here could be called creative, but absolutely none of them are nonfiction. Nonfiction is the study of issues or phenomena with evidence and analysis. Here we have a collection of what everyone else in the world calls memoirs, and which have been easily found for decades in magazines and newspapers. While such works can be a relaxing and... more info
Don't miss this inspiring collection:
Whether you're a reader, a writer, or a dabbler, you'll surely find plenty in this lovely collection to please your mind and lighten your spirit. Not one of the essays is longer than 2000 words, and many are only a paragraph or three in length. Yet each is a little sparkling gem, a nugget of pure gold. There's one by Kathleen Norris (already known for her lyrical spiritual writing) about rain that just takes the breath away. Each, in some small way, connects us to the common pulse of humanity running... more info
A truly collaborative work of art:
So many of the stories in this book are just so poignant, so special, so.... ! They are like individual little works of art.
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