Come to Me - Softcover

Bloom, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0333604938 ISBN 13: 9780333604939

Publisher: New York, Harper Collins, 1994, 1994

Synopsis

'This debut collection, human and humorous, is an impressive display ...Bloom is uncensorious, revelling in the predicaments she has created for her protagonists and their instinct for survival ...She has great flexibility of narrative voice, whether as a middle-aged furrier in love with a schoolgirl or a young boy who accidentally shoots his cousin with his father's gun' The Times 'Bereavement, moral breakdown and sexual non-conformity are the deep waters into which Amy Bloom plunges in her first book -- though causing scarcely a ripple in the smooth narrative surface ...Bloom's advice seems to be: whatever it takes to scrape through life, do it -- grand gesture or compromise, sex or shopping' Independent on Sunday 'Amy Bloom's debut collection is a book which beckons if it is put down unfinished, and which -- although contemporary -- provides all the engrossing satisfaction of a nineteenth-century novel' Guardian 'An impressive addition to the booming renaissance in the American short story. Bloom has all the elegant acuity of a modern day Flannery O'Connor ...Her style is astonishingly versatile: wry and acerbic one minute; generous and passionate the next' GQ 'This is truly a collection that leaves the reader in a state of grace' Sunday Times

About this title

Review:

Amy Bloom's 1993 collection, Come to Me, is filled with yearning mysteries of romantic and familial love that are far more complex than the phrase "love story" allows. The first sentence of the first story, "Love Is Not a Pie," evinces the contradictions, layers, and interconnections of her narrator's existence--and hooks the reader entirely. "In the middle of the eulogy at my mother's boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding." The title phrase means exactly what it says: Lila's mother didn't have a finite amount of affection and was lucky not to be forced to choose between love's accepted forms and a more unusual one: "People think that it can't be that way, but it can. You just have to find the right people." Lila realizes that she needs to get out of her engagement because she isn't ready for normality.

The unusual pervades these stories, and Bloom handles some outsized events with delicacy and humor. In "Sleepwalking," a new widow sends her stepson away after they've slept together, because she wants him to have a normal life. The author makes us aware that there's something terrible and foolhardy about this woman's decision. Several other characters find themselves in equally desperate situations, their only consolation being recollections of earlier bliss, often sensual: "It was like nothing else in my life, that river of love that I could dip into and leave and return to once more and find it still flowing." For them, memories of past happiness makes present sorrow bearable.

About the Author:

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, three collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She lives in Connecticut and is Wesleyan University's Writer-in-Residence.

About this edition

• Publisher: New York, Harper Collins, 1994
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0333604938
• ISBN 13: 9780333604939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190