Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

by Amy Hempel

Book Overview

Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel's Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684838877
• ISBN13: 9780684838878
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

awe-stricken

an incredible author. but don't buy this, there's a copy with all three amy hemple collections. tumble home is just one of three. get them all because it would be a shame to go through this life never having read them.

Don't let the shortness and simplicity fool you...

...this is an amazing piece of work. I loved reading Tumble Home. This short-story collection is brief (only 160 pages long) and the stories are deceptively simple. But each story holds profound messages centered on family life and other every day events that may seem insignificant at first glance. My favorite stories are "Sportsman," "The New Lodger," "The Children's Party," and the novella "Tumble Home." Again, the stories are very short, but nevertheless beautiful. Amy Hempel's writing is sparse but possesses such beautiful prose that I just couldn't put this collection down. Hers is a voice that sounds poetic at times. I recommend this book to all short-story lovers.

So short yet long

Hempel's slim novella 'Tumble Home,' has a hypnotic prose that leaves the reader concentrating on every word. The short stories are so earthy you feel as if you're among family. Minimalism has never been used so effectively with Hempel's description of everyday americana.

Amazing

Hempel is a master at weaving different voices and styles through her short stories and novellas. She, at times, borders on almost a prosetry in her work which some may find difficult, but I believe is bold, insightful, and some of the best writing in America today.

A sublime book.

In a decade of flabby mass-dense but weightless prose, when PCs coax 800 page novels from 3 page brains and there is no fiction that has enough edge to cut soft butter, in a time when short stories are carelessly wrought retreads of rehashed earlier stories, inflicted on readers in the borrowed and depressing syntax of 1950's hackiest fictions, in these bleak days there is one writer, one yet, who still works to make us wince, or laugh out loud, or see the world made new. Look to her tropes, her figurings and how none of her stuff seems mannered, but it's all easy and natural and bright. Buy the book, friend.