Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR From the bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs: A collection of twelve stories thats one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability (The New York Times Book Review).A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and SelfHelp. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.From the opening story, Willingabout a secondrate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human beingBirds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America.In the story Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People (There is nothing as complex in the worldno flower or stoneas a single hello from a human being), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a longplanned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky woman she really is.In Charades, a family game at Christmas is transformed into a hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of crumbling family ties.In Community Life,a shy, almost reclusive, librarian, Transylvaniaborn and Vermontbred, moves in with her boyfriend, the local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose. And in Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens, a woman who goes through the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Hagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had, Bosnia.