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In some ways this reminds me of The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, in that there are SO MANY things I love about it, but Yu cannot let you forget, even for a second, exactly what he thinks women are for. The last story was so explicit about it, it left me so upset. (view spoiler)[It is literally a letter to all women that they should love men who seem unloveable so they don't kill themselves. (hide spoiler)]I liked the first story a lot, Standard Loneliness Package, which had a really interes...
I put Charles Yu’s second short story collection, Sorry Please Thank You, on my 2021 TBR after reading his short story ‘Good News Bad News’ in A People’s Future of the United States. Yu has been compared to the brilliant science fiction writer Ted Chiang, but honestly I don’t think they have much in common (cynically, you might say that they’ve been squashed together because they’re both Chinese-American men who write speculative short fiction). Chiang’s work is intensely cerebral and serious, w...
Charles Yu has been making a big splash. His short story collection THIRD CLASS SUPERHERO won him the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. Then he received the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. Last year his debut novel HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE came out to near universal acclaim including being named a New York Times notable book and 2011 Best Book of the Year by such publications as Time Magazine and io9. He comfortably straddles science fiction and liter...
way too caught up in its own (supposed) cleverness and metafictionality to actually deliver good short stories
I am in a hospice.I have been here before. A regular client.I am holding a pen.I have just written something on a notepad in front of me.My husband is gone.He died years ago.Today is the tenth anniversary of his death.I have Alzheimer’s, I think.A memory of my husband surfaces, like a white-hot August afternoon, resurfacing in the cool water of November.I tear off the sheet of paper.I read it to myself.It is a suicide note.I raise a glass to my mouth, swallow a pill. Catch a glance of my note to...
3.4 ⭐ Rounded down.A baker's dozen 'high concept' stories. They are, for want of a better term: speculative fiction; sci-fi; space fish ( I forget who coined that term but it's apt, here).About half of them are what you would call conventional stories with a plot, characters and a more or less conclusion. The others are creative writing projects, with varying degrees of success. Mostly they're all forgettable.That's not to say I didn't laugh a few times.My main objection is the stories are too d...
I bought this book first, but the very first Charles Yu work I've read was my next purchase which was How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe. I could never begin to tell you just how madly in love I was with it from start to finish. You can read my review about it in case you're curious. Now, if I sit still for a moment and think about it again for a whole minute, I might get lost inside my own head and never recover. The only reason I bought this other book was because of one of the quoted...
Re-reading six years later, and my star rating remains a 5. I may like the last two stories less this time around, although that could be because I read them late on the historically awful night of Nov 3, 2020, when my mind was melting.----------------------------------------I've finally come to like short stories and this book has one of my all time favorites, "Hero Absorbs Major Damage", a first person narrative about an action hero in a video game. (He's more sensitive than he looks and is st...
I loved loved loved the first story "Standard Loneliness Package." Quite inventive and impactful. I thought I was in for a firecracker of a short story collection because of it. Sadly, none of the other stories reached the heights of that first story. They weren't bad, but there wasn't enough for me to chew on. Yu is one of a kind. Between this and Interior Chinatown, there's no doubt about that.
I have always felt that the short story is the perfect literary form and that a good short story can be as poignant as a novel, lyrical as a poem, and as dramatic as a play. A good science fiction short story can be ground-breaking.Charles Yu has already made a name for himself in the science fiction community based on his debut novel, “How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe”, and two short story collections. I have not read his novel or his first short story collection, “Third Class...
Sorry, please, thank you, you're welcome - words to live by.This was a good is made up of some stories that were just okay, most that were good and two that were great.This sci-fi collection was easy to get into and highly readable.
