Come to Me

Literature & Fiction

Amy. Bloom

Short Stories & Anthologies

Picador

By the author of "Come To Me". Elizabeth is clever, difficult and unlovable as a child, forging strange bonds with unsuitable people. As she grows into womanhood Elizabeth continues to cause chaos. This story of growing up presents love across the generations and love across racial difference.

Love Invents Us

Pan Books, Ltd.

â??Some people are your family, no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.â??

PICADOR (MACM)

In these stories we meet more of Amy Bloom's irresistible characters: a woman recovering from cancer while her best friend and husband face their loneliness and a new friendship; a mother coming to know that her wonderful little girl is a boy; a man and his stepmother in a complicated dance of memory, anger and forgiveness. These are stories on the frontiers of emotions, stories about the uncertain gestures of love, the betrayals of the flesh and the surprises of the heart. 'Connectedness, or the lack of it, is the theme of nearly all the stories . . . They are small masterpieces' Sunday Times 'Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books' New Yorker 'Any new book by Amy Bloom is a cause for celebration and this fabulously titled collection of stories is no exception... Bloom, already hailed as one of the best short story writers of her generation, is wickedly knowing with the sort of perfectly paced writing which can blow the reader away with the tiniest detail' The Times

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Contemporary

Literary

BOOKS-ON-TAPE, INC.

Lucky Us

Genre Fiction

BOOKS ON TAPE]

<p>Amy Bloom has long been regarded as a master of the short story form. Here, her brilliance shines across two decades and more than twenty-five stories. From the bereaved widow who finds unexpected comfort in 'Sleepwalking', to the matchmaking shrink in 'Psychoanalysis Changed My Life'; from the teenage girl furious at her dying mother in 'Hold Tight' to the transgressive lovers of 'The Gates Are Closing'; from the married friends irresistibly drawn to one another in 'William and Clare' to the brave and heartless girl in 'Permafrost' - these are stories brimming with life and grief, erotically charged and beautifully crafted.</p>

Rowing to Eden: Collected Stories

Granta

In Love

<p>In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge 'into the darkness of an expiring existence'.\nWritten with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom's intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer's, and then on becoming a widow. It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death. A poignant love letter to Bloom's husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.</p>

A Letter from Author Amy Bloom   Short Is Good I have loved short stories since I was a girl reading Hawthorne and Poe. Melville was a little sophisticated for me; I had to wait until I was a sulky teenager to love “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and then I took to walking around the house murmuring “I would prefer not to.” My father, a Melville admirer, begged for mercy. At the same time that I was reading the great American 19th century short story, I was also discovering my father’s library of pre- and post-World War II wits. Dorothy Parker was not just the funny, brittle woman at the Algonquin Table; she knew sadness and self-deception from the inside out and she could put it on the page with painful, personal frankness and not a bit of self-preserving paint or pretense. Her sentences are wry, but they bleed (“The Big Blonde”). I read S.J. Perelman, the Jewish smart-aleck of “Westward Ha!” and Robert Benchley, the urbane gentleman who could keep his head and his martini, even on an ice floe. (“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, it’s just compounding a felony.”) I read odd, funny, sometimes disturbing James Thurber and used his “In the Catbird Seat” to plan my comeuppance of my high school principal.  The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge. Writing short stories requires Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and some help from Gregory Hines. We are the cat burglars of the business: in and out in a relatively short time, quietly dressed (not for us the grand gaudiness of 600 pages and a riff on our favorite kind of breakfast cereal) to accomplish something shocking—and lasting—without throwing around the furniture.  Flannery O’Connor (a reliable source when appreciating the short story) wrote that short stories deliver “the experience of surprise”. The surprise, I think, is that so few pages can contain so much, that what is taken to be a prism turns out to be not only a window, but a door, as well.  If you’re an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity. Of the folksy and the hip, of traditional yarn-spinning and innovative flourishes. Of men and women, of war and loss and love, with a few ghosts and many roads not taken. And in all of that, you will find some of the funniest and most heartbreaking fiction, ever. (You could take a break right now and go find Parker’s “The Waltz” and Carver’s “Cathedral”.)  Short stories have no net. The writer cannot take a leisurely sixty pages to get things moving, or make a side trip onto a barely related subject, or slack off in the last forty pages. Everything is right now, right here, in the reader’s grasp and mind’s eye. The writer has 20 to thirty pages to entice, seduce, enter and alter the reader. For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

Where the God of Love Hangs out

Granta. 1 Paperback(s)

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Granta Books

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Books by Amy. Bloom