Vroege RecensentenAmy Bloom

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Stephen L. Carter, John Crowley, Amy Bloom, Alice Mattison, Chris Knopf, Jonathan Stone, Sarah Pemberton Strong, Karen E. Olson, Jessica Speart, Chandra Prasad, David Rich, and Hirsh Sawhney. New Haven may be best known for Yale University, but its criminal dimensions run as deep as anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Whether the setting is a college campus, the waterfront, East Rock, The Hill, or Wooster Square, the stories in this volume bring the full city to life—and death. From editor Amy Bloom: New Haven in not a tourist kind of town. Yes, if you want to see the Cushing brain collection of 400 brains-in-jars (with another 150 planned for display), including artifacts like the piece of steak signed (if that’s the word)—using an electrosurgical knife—by Ivan Pavlov, and plenty of infant skulls. Also, more transcendently, you can visit beautiful Beinecke Library, a six-story tower of translucent marble, instead of mere glass, protecting the rare books, including my favorite, the Voynich manuscript, written centuries ago in what seems to be a fictional language with drawings of plants that don’t exist. Also, for the picnickers, the tomb of Midnight Mary in the eighty-five-acre Evergreen Cemetery, right off Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. On her gravestone, it reads: The people shall be troubled at midnight and pass away. It’s a noir kind of town. I love New Haven. I asked other writers who have the same odd, deep affection for the city that I do to tell me their stories. Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Stephen L. Carter, Alice Mattison, John Crowley. And more. We’ve got the darkly funny, the darker, the ineffable, and the deeply brooding. What we’ve got for you, right here . . . is New Haven.

“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” So begins the story of teenage half sisters Eva and Iris in this brilliantly written, deeply moving, and fantastically funny novel by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey across 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the sisters from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with memorable characters and unexpected turns, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, these unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship. Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe. Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, "Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom's work--her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart--come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.