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Title: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories by Amy Bloom ISBN: 0375705570 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 31 July, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.28
Rating: 3
Summary: Using the carnival as a crutch
Comment: Amy Bloom is such a talented writer that I have a hard time understanding why she so often sinks to writing about weirdness to make her stories fly. Every one of these stories involves a main character who's not just isolated by health or circumstance, but just too odd to relate to. Of course Bloom can use these physical conditions to point to a shared humanity (okay, I get it, we're all freaks), but these stories highlight their weirdness in a way that evokes pity and spectatorship rather than understanding, sympathy, or respect.
Many of the excellent stories in "Come to Me" touch on this treatment, but the outcome is a glimpse at or understanding of a human emotion, condition, a "how this kind of thing could happen in anyone's life" feeling-- not the feeling you've just viewed a circus-train wreck.
I loved most of the stories in "Come to Me" but felt disappointed by both "A Blind Man..." and "Love Invents Us" for this same reason. All the ideas she evokes could be illustrated without the extreme examples. I'm left with a great respect for a writer who can write a couple of the most beautiful short stories I've read ("Silver Water" and "Love is Not a Pie" are brilliant), but wondering if she's appealing to something less noble in readers-- our slithering undersides, gawking at the strange and the carnival-- rather than the parts of us that make us better people. Is that the point?
Rating: 5
Summary: Very compelling.
Comment: Amy Bloom has a gift for writing about rather repellent characters in a way that makes them very sympathetic to the reader. These stories are emotional, clever and thought-provoking examinations of how humans struggle to connect with each other.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautifully Written, Thouroughly Engaging
Comment: Reading one of Bloom's stories takes a short amount of time, but when I finish one I feel satisfied as if I'd read an entire novel. That's the earmark of an excellent short story writer. Furthermore, although Bloom deals with subjects that are far from mainstream (such as the experience of a trans teenager) she does so to create an interesting and relatable story without being sensational.
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Title: Come to Me: Stories by Amy Bloom ISBN: 0060995149 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom ISBN: 0375750223 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Personal Velocity by Rebecca Miller ISBN: 0802139183 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude by Amy Bloom ISBN: 067945652X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Golden Notebook : Perennial Classics edition by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 006093140X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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