The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel · 2006
Hempel learned from Gordon Lish and Carver but found her own mode: darkly funny, grieving, syntactically inventive. "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" may be the most emotionally efficient story written in the last 40 years.
The case against
Hempel's narrators deflect grief with the same wised-up one-liner, and across four hundred collected pages the trick becomes audible. Many stories run two pages and evaporate on contact. After the Al Jolson story, which earns its fame, you keep waiting for a second summit; what follows is a long, witty plateau populated by dogs.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
