WE SO SELDOM LOOK ON LOVE - Softcover

Gowdy, Barbara

4.11

1,119 ratings by Goodreads

9780007291564: WE SO SELDOM LOOK ON LOVE

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007291566 ISBN 13: 9780007291564

Publisher: Flamingo, 2008

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A debut collection of short stories by the author of the novel "Falling Angels". Populated by an assortment of freaks, Siamese twins, voyeurs, exhibitionists, necrophiles and transsexuals, this collection of extraordinary, bizarre and often grotesque stories is shot through with humorous sympathy.

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Review:

From the author of the blockbuster Mister Sandman comes a gathering of unusual characters captured in the outrageous and humorous situations for which Barbara Gowdy has become famous. Teasing the taboos, Gowdy creates a marriage dialogue between a woman and her transsexual fianc�, who she thought was a man, and litigation between Samuel and Simon who share the same two-headed body. She peoples her stories with Siamese twins, a necrophile, and a pathetically lonely exhibitionist. And she brilliantly illustrates how uncomfortably close a connection comedy has to human suffering. The title story has been adapted into a movie called "Kissed.

From the Inside Flap:

NOW IN PAPERBACK, this masterfully crafted story collection by the author of the internationally best-selling novel "Mister Sandman is a haunting book that is certain to both disturb and entertain. With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, "We So Seldom Look On Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain, the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, the erotic delusions of a woman who repeatedly exposes her body to an unknown voyeur, or the bizarre predilections of a female necrophile (a story made into the acclaimed motion picture, "Kissed"), Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor. In reviewing the book in the Boston Globe, the novelist Carol Shields wrote, "Barbara Gowdy invites herself, and us, into taboo territory where love and disgust mingle freely. Nothing seems to hold back the narrative flow, not propriety, not politics, not even that ambiguity we once called good taste . . . Gowdy writes about the macabre, but she writes like an angel."

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