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Product Description
In the title story of this collection, neighborhood boys crouch in a backyard toolshed, and conspire to prove their piano teachers to be witches. In "Cannibal Kings," a disillusioned young man accompanies a troubled boy on a tour of prep schools through the Pacific Northwest, only to realize that he has lost his way in life. And in "Come Live With Me And Be My Love," a middle-aged gentleman looks back at his mannered early life as a Ivy Leaguer, married to a vivacious woman but silently yearning for his best friend -- and the sacrifices that each made to uphold their compromising bargain.
With a classic storyteller's gift for nuance and understanding, and a poet's grace for language, Andrew Sean Greer makes a remarkable debut with How It Was For Me.
Amazon.com Review
An auspicious debut of American realistic short fiction, How It Was for Me manages to strike every emotional tone from sweetness to despair, like a short symphony. The dominant tone is one of rueful self-recognition, often in retrospect. In "Lost Causes," for example, a man looks back on a four-month period in his early twenties in which he was, for the first and last time, achingly beautiful, the sort of boy who makes even straight men stare in appreciation. He had no idea at the time that he been transported into beauty, and even now, recalling his brief blossoming, remembers it only through "the evidence of my face's effect: men fixing my computer for free, paying for my bus fare, arguing over me in bars." He made no important use of this four-month window, and it passed, leaving only photographs. The handsome protagonist of "The Walker" is similarly unaware, a widower who spends the evenings of his grief escorting wealthy divorcees and widows to the opera. Deftly executed, with odd, mordant touches, Greer's eleven stories put him in the ranks of Nathan Englander. With luck, he will reach as large an audience.--Regina Marler
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