Synopses & Reviews
Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.
Review
"As we read, we learn that to discover meaning in stray pieces of our universe is a happy, curative act....Hempel makes haunting bits of beauty out of motley scraps." Adam Begley, People
Synopsis
Long admired for her "tough-minded, original, and fully felt short stories" (Sheila Ballyntyne, the New York Times Book Review), Amy Hempel takes her art to new heights in her first remarkable novella as well as in her latest collection of stories that comment on life's ironies with decidedly offbeat intelligence.
About the Author
Amy Hempel is the author of Tumble Home, Reasons to Live, and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper's, Playboy, the Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and lives in New York City.
Table of Contents
Weekend
Church cancels cow
The children's party
Sportsman
Housewife
The annex
The new lodger
Tumble home