Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir: Stories - Softcover

Meno, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810124246 ISBN 13: 9780810124240

Publisher: TriQuarterly, 2007

Synopsis

Winner of 2006 The Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award

Children who anesthetize--and dress up--small wild animals in an ill-fated attempt to cheer their grieving mother; childhood friends who ritually return every year to the site of their near-kidnapping; an awkward teen trying to find his place among the cultural ruins of Greek Mythology Camp; brothers brought together, if not by mutual understanding, by a strange need to steal airport baggage: these are some of the characters who inhabit--and invariably tell--the stories in Joe Meno's Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir. Oddballs and charmers and would-be lovers, they are souls not so much lost as wandering, looking for something better, almost getting laid, trying to explain or, if all else fails, to entertain--and this they unfailingly do. Rarely has fiction so understated produced such hilarity and heartbreak.

Novelist, music journalist, and playwright Meno writes squarely in the American tradition of wringing large effects from small change, revealing the subtlety in the broad stroke, and conveying complexity with seeming simplicity. Celebrated for its "unflinching honesty" (Entertainment Weekly) and for its "poetic and visceral style" (Booklist), his work resonates with the unmistakable magic and curious mystery of modern life.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Meno is the author of the novels Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic/Punk Planet, 2004), which was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection for 2004, How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins, 2001), and Tender as Hellfire (St. Martin's, 1999) and of an online serial, The Secret Hand. Winner of the 2003 Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, Meno lives in Chicago, teaches at Columbia College, and is a columnist for Punk Planet.

From Publishers Weekly

In Meno's offbeat universe, a horse predicts the future by crying into a bucket, and the Astronaut of the Year gets memorialized on ceramic garlic holders. The author (most recently of Hairstyles of the Damned) narrates his tales of awkward interpersonal relationships unfolding amid semisurreal situations in a cool, half-adolescent deadpan. First of the 17 stories is "The Use of Medicine," which has a great premise—kids putting costumes on anesthetized wild animals in the hopes of cheering up their mother, depressed after her husband's suicide—but falters in the telling, with too much import riding on the final ineffective line. Meno follows that up with a much better story about a dilapidated Greek Mythology Camp with "an Oracle-themed outhouse," one concerning a man who receives a "big settlement" from "a bad haircut" and another in which a lovesick livery driver obsesses over a "height-challenged" model who left him and went on to star in a TV series, World's Tallest Man Marries World's Shortest Woman. Though these stories don't always end as well as they begin, they're edgy and interesting, with a fine blend of the dark and the absurd. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: TriQuarterly
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0810124246
• ISBN 13: 9780810124240
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192