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I probably would have enjoyed this chapbook anyway, but I appreciated it so much more after moving to the Midwest. This book is sharp and precise, but not clinical. Its stories are peppered with whiskey and heartbreak and travel--a messily organized and comfortable trip through an America that most people know but few people write faithfully about.
These short (very short!) stories are fascinating! The author has an impressive ability to acquaint the reader with vibrant, deep, complex, and often somewhat dark, troubled characters in a matter of paragraphs. I was intrigued by the voice of each story, wanting to know more about them (rather,"her", as it seemed the voice was always a woman), when the stories come to a quick end. And yet I didn't feel that they ended too abruptly - I felt satisfied with a complete story, left at the right mome...
I bought up a bunch of copies of this collection to use in my writing class at Saint Joseph's University. First, the writing is so great: "Love is an ocean, pounding and pounding on the rocks, like Christmas tree lights blinking in a window, beckoning." The movement from ocean, to the rhythmic pounding, to the blinking of lights awes me. And I love the way the sentence ends with "beckoning." So many sentences are like this. Such brilliance! There's an urgency and longing in the writing and stori...
Whoever called these wickedly good was right on target. It's hard to resist the title, and equally hard to resist the stories: condensed, beautiful, insightful, altogether good. I admire this writing and this book a great deal.
I have not read this book as a whole, it is on my TBR list, but give it a 4 star rating based on the stories I've read elsewhere.The title story is wonderful.as is Oklahoma Men.
What flash should be.
Although it goes by different names depending on whom you ask, the literary term that I prefer for very short stories is flash fiction. Flash fiction stories are generally between 50-500 words and cover all territories that full-length short stories tackle. In other words, they are perfect brief journeys for those who would rather read literature than cheap magazines while waiting for their oil to be changed or their bowels to move. The sad truth though is that few writers can actually condense
The form asked for my best guess of the "date I read this book." That's a difficult question. I first read it in 2002, I think--whatever the date was when it first hit the shelves. I have read it dozens of times since then and I am still reading it. This book has brains and heart. It also has something so many books today lack: a graceful, un-self-conscious, integrated sense of language. One sentence can make you swoon, can make you laugh, can make you cry, can turn grit into beauty and beauty i...
One of my favorite flash fiction books. She is especially talented with condensing and layering time, and she gets lots of credit for experimenting and taking chances.
This collection ends with three words: pure, sweet, uncluttered. These adjectives describe the possibility of happiness, but they also describe the author's writing style. The women in I Call This Flirting are vivid and intense. The men are enigmatic though very closely observed. Cats figure in many of the scenes. As do pies--burned pies and beautiful pies. Also screen doors and the sky and the ground and sex.Such good writing.
I Call This Flirting has this stripped-down Alice Munro thing going on that is fantastic. Not the situations per se, Alice Munro never had a lonely character sleep with the paperboy, and I don't think her characters drink this much, but the sense of longing and found love, how we get it and lose it invoked Munro for me.
Gorgeous writing. I didn't want it to be over.
Just received my copy of this, I'm very eager to read Sherrie Flick's chapbook. Okay, read it and whooosh, loved it very much. My favorite of the whole collection was "Nebraska Men" which begins with this odd, perfect sentence: "In Nebraska men keep small colorful seashells in their mouths."
