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Some Fun: Stories and a Novella
Antonya Nelson
#UB2112
Hardcover, 237 pages; 2006
$17.60
It also seemed to Claire that she had been promoted that morning, from one of the three children in the house to one of the adults. She'd changed sides instantaneously, as easily as stepping though a door, standing tall while her father lay prone on the floor, next lodging her hand under his other elbow to help her mother resurrect him.
A great way to know who's up-and-coming in literature is to keep an eye on the prizes. Antonya Nelson has won an astonishing number of them. When you read her stories, you'll want to add your kudos to the list. Nelson's fiction is sharp, funny, poignant, thoughtful, and smart. I loved "Flesh Tone," about a teenage boy whose dead mother speaks to him and helps him find love. In "Only a Thing," graffiti left in her home by teenaged vandals jolts an adulterous wife and mother back to reality and back home. In the novella "Some Fun," excerpted above, precociously mature Claire has been to six funerals in her fifteen years with her hardscrabble Texas famil--and no weddings. She recognizes the irony in it all. Antonya Nelson infuses her fiction with details and observations that can only come from experience. Each character becomes flesh and blood. Read Some Fun, and you can then advise your friends on who new to read.
(EE)
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