My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

by Steve Almond

Book Overview

Steve Almond's collection My Life in Heavy Metal presents twelve passion-fueled stories (including his Pushcart Prize-winning story "The Pass") that take a clear-eyed view of relationships between young men and women who have come of age in an era without innocence. These are powerful and resonant stories of love and lust, that bring to life a generation desperately searching for connection in a fragmented world.

In the title story, an El...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802140130
• ISBN13: 9780802140135
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.5" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

For those who hate books, you might just love this one.

I will be the first to admit, i hate books and reading, for the most part. Sure, i enjoyed catcher in the rye, the same book that every person, or at least every teenager, loves. But "My Life in Heavy Metal" became the first book that i ever bought, solely for my own enjoyment. Introduced to me through a college freshman writing class was the short story "How to Be a Republican," one of a collection of short stories in this book by Steve Almond. "How to be a Republican" is one of my favorite of the stories i have read so far from the collection, but i have not yet read them all. In all of the stories, the main character is Dave (Steve Almond) who is fighting between different forces of love (friendship, romance, and sex). These stories take you in with them. You become emotionally attached to characters, esp. Dave, wanting to help him all the time. The stories are very real, and sometimes graphic with their sensual imagery...il finish this later

Sex is Good

And so is this book. Although I think that the title story is structurally the weakest, Almond's fiction is tight, decisive, full of humor and poignant moments. He's great at saying exactly what he needs to say in the way he wants to say it. The characters are great too.

Take it slow

The publisher should advise the reader to take these stories one at a time. Blow through it, and you'll miss the micro details, the nuances of language, the zoom lens observations that remind you of why you love reading in the first place. Yes, there's sex here. And if that turns you off, by all means take a pass. But if you love the idea of small moments made large with words utterly original, yet never contrived or self-conscious, check it out. My Life in Heavy Metal is rich with jewels

I didn't know short stories could be this much fun.

I don't usually like reading short stories (I borrowed the book from a friend) but the stories in this collection were so entertaining and so easy to get into, I was really surprised and pleased. Some of them made me laugh out loud, and in all of them I found things I could relate to about relationships and sex. I definitely would recommend it to anyone.

"My Life in Heavy Metal"

My Life in Heavy Metal is a wonderful first book of short stories, so funny in places that it is easy to miss what is serious, disturbing and funny about it. It is a tremendously bawdy book, and its humor--for instance when the narrator of "How to Love a Republican" speculates on why Republican men shun cunnilingus--is wild and bawdy. But the humor in these pieces is more often than not a sad humor, its narrators essentially unforgiving of themselves. More often than not, Almond seems to suggest, sex is the hard place where the ego splinters and fragments and after which the ego rejoins, battered but tragically reinforced. The stories vary in tone. "Geek Player, Love Slayer" is one of two or three stories that essentially borrow their structure from romantic comedies. In deed, one could imagine some smart producer optioning them. The short shorts in this collection--"Moscow" and "The Law of Honey"--are lyrical celebrations of the force of desire and the goodness of desire. These are brief lyrics that celebrate the pursuit and not consummation as part of our noblest aspirations. Almond is attracted to an earthy dream of eastern Europe that we might get from the poems of Simic or Milosz as a sort of pure imaginative territory of smoked meat, pickled fish, and cabbage, a smoke-filled alternative to the disembodied health of snowboarders and their ilk. "The Last Single Days of Don Victor Potapenko" has some of the mouthy chutzpah of Babel's Jewish gangster stories like "How It Was Done In Kiev." Almond's natural story telling terrain is the culture of young, intensely ambitious and narcissistic educated professionals. Ambition, narcissism: how much of America does that cover? One wonders if Almond, a former journalist, chose to move to Boston to examine the specimens that he needed to tell his stories. There is a certain amount of sociological comedy in his tales of life on the edges of college campuses. His story "The Pass" simultaneously tells the story of people making passes at each other: two gay soldiers at a night club in German, two middle aged business people in an airport, a couple having a possibly romantic dinner in an apartment, and best of all, some sort of software schnook at an apartment party in what sounds like Cambridge. There is some fantasia, some of his Eastern European wit in his well imagined German nightclub. But his bread and butter egotists are sitting down to sup and drank somewhere between Harvard and Tufts. Some of the stories in the collection are linked narratives, a sort of Rake's Progress, about a character named David, an aspiring writer with a disastrous love life. The first of these is "My Life in Heavy Metal" is set in Texas where David whom we meet as a young journalist carrying on an affair with a lifeguard while living with his ideal girlfriend from college. This is a story about the disastrous effects of infidelity, a story of sexual shame. A third story deals with the same character a few years later, condu