A few years ago a friend of mine asked me to look for a copy of a book called At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom by Amy Hempel. At the time, a hardcover first edition was selling on Amazon for about $50. It's still hanging around at that price. I kept my eyes peeled while on my book rounds, but no kingdom of animals turned up, other than a wild book or two by Marlin Perkins. (If you get that joke, you must be over 40.)
Anyway, I saw The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel at the library and checked it out. I'm really enjoying it. Hempel has been labeled a "minimalist" but I don't know how accurate that (or any) label really is. I just know I'm enjoying her stories and plan to blog about one of them in detail tomorrow.
I started looking for non-Internet info. on Hempel and was surprised that she appeared neither in my 1998 copy of The Reading List: Contemporary Fiction: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works of 110 Authors* or in The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000), although she had three collections in print before these books came out. What's up with that?
Ah, but she does appear in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (2001), so at least Amy's getting some lovin' somewhere.
Anyway, more about one of her stories tomorrow. In the meantime, check her out. The new collection covers her previous four short story collections, which I believe is her entire output thus far. If the book isn't in your local library or if you don't want to shell out the $$ for a hardcover, the paperback edition will be released on September 18.
* Which has now been expanded to 125 authors, but still doesn't include Hempel.
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500 words on a new story. (One of mine, not one of Amy's.) Always a good way to start the weekend.
2 comments:
I read Hempel's collection The Dog of the Marriage just recently. I was quite taken with the title story, but the rest were a mixed bag for me. "Reference #388475848-5" and "What Were the White Things?" left me... puzzled, let's say. I'd like to get Collected Stories and read a wider sample of her work.
Since The Collected Stories presents her work as it appeared in each collection, I'm eager to see how her work progresses. I'm almost through the first collection, Reasons To Live, which is pretty amazing. I can't imagine the quality improving from this point.
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