2.99 todayThis was my first book by Anthony Doerr. Each story was made up of rich, dimensional characters and beautiful prose. This collection of short stories tempers hope with despair and you will find yourself thinking about them long after you finish. All The Light We Cannot See has been on my TBR list for sometime, I am looking forward to reading it. This has been an awesome year of reading for me with many new authors!Immediately drawn to this cover!

I think reading the stories more than once helped me enjoy them a little bit more than my first take on them. I can't say that I have a favorite story, but I think I liked the last one the best. I am looking forward to reading All the Light...

This collection starts strong, then it starts to seem like this guy's instrument doesn't have too many strings and then he tries to write about Africans.The first three stories are memorable and rewarding, pleasantly removed from day-to-day circumstances and romantically committed to unlikely pairings and second shots--"So Many Chances" I might read again just for pleasure. But, Doerr is hung up on female characters who aren't human (or female)--one dimensional fantasy objects for boy poets who

Doerr is magnificent writer of breathtaking prose, poetic descriptions of nature's beauty and sudden harshness, and evocative characterization of uniquely interesting yet all too human characters. The Shell Collector is one of the richest short stories I've ever read. It has more weight than many a novel. The richness of the points of view, the dynamic between unexpected characters reminds me of Chekhov. I am not a frequent reader of short stories but I picked this up after reading a review of D...

Doerr's earliest work, and even in this collection, his talent was already evident. Most of the stories are very good. I was disappointed with "July Fourth," which lacked the depth and the insight of the others. "The Caretaker" was the best story, in my view, and represented an early glimpse of the kind of writing he is best at today: a stark examination of life, guilt, strife, meaning, and longing.

This is a collection of short stories from a pretty young author--really beautiful stuff. Sharon, this is the book I told you about with the story about the hunter's wife who touches the dying animals to feel their pain and their life. It stems from there to get even more dramatic and metaphysical but seriously.....the stories in here absolutely changed me and made me want to become a writer. There's a story in here about a homeless man who cuts out the hearts of beached whales and buries them a...

A good collection with some really strong stories, especially in the beginning. Lovely atmosphere and writing. Unfortunately though, by the end, the stories got a bit repetitive and I felt myself getting a little bored.

Maybe not all the stories in this collection are as brilliant as "The Caretaker" and "Mkondo" (a perfect ending to the book), or maybe it only seems that way because these two set the bar so high. In any case, all of them are beautifully crafted and lovely to read, some taking you to remote worlds you most likely will never go to yourself.Along with the much larger theme of the force of life in both nature and mankind, other subtle threads run through each story: the different manifestations of

This was a selection of my short story book club, which was an article in The Chicago Review , 12/21/2001.Many of us are familiar with this author's book, All the Light We Cannot See . The interesting feature of that book is that the main character is blind, as is the protagonist in this brief tale. This aspect arouses many questions. Many believe that the unsighted person has increased sensitivities in other senses. Does this mean that they are more capable to view failings of others? Does thi...

I was lead to The Shell Collector directly by the author’s current best seller All the Light We Cannot See. On a certain level, the books have similarities: blindness and nature and objects with magic properties. But I found my interaction with the two books to be very different. With Light I was easily drawn in by the language and the story whereas with Collector I was immediately put off by the story, confused by the details and uncertain where I was being led. The language was similarly mesme...

Description: A remarkable collection of stories from a young American writer of huge potential: 'A show-stopping debut, as close to faultless as any writer could wish for' Los Angeles Times 'His fingers dug the shell up, he felt the sleek egg of its body, the toothy gap of its aperture. It was the most elegant thing he'd ever held. "That's a mouse cowry," the doctor said. "A lovely find. It has brown spots, and darker stripes at its base, like tiger stripes. You can't see it, can you?" But he co...

This collection of short stories is lifeless. It's everything I hate about writing: boring stories that take place in "exotic" locations, featuring "interesting" charcters, written by a 29 year old white guy invested in authenticity. Uggh.

Anthony Doerr's stories always spark interest in the most unusual things.These are two of my favorite stories from this collection.THE SHELL COLLECTOR is a heartwarming tale about a blind man who on a verge of losing his eyesight develops the love for smooth and delicate shells on the beach of Florida. He then decides to devote his entire life to searching and studying various kinds of shells all around the world, becoming thus one of the wisest men in the field. Until he accidentally discovers

In each of these 8 gratifyingly longish stories we have time to bond with the mostly floundering oddball characters that populate them. AD has a talent for pulling a reader in from the first sentence, and he lays things out without fuss, yet it would be a mistake to take things for granted and prepare for a twist on the anticipated twist, and maybe a few deep laughs.She was learning that in her life everything- health, happiness, even love- was subject to the landscape. p199