Amy Hempel is the author of Sing to It, The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including Best American Short Stories and The Best Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College, and at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives near New York City.
"Each purified sentence [in Sing to It] is itself a story, a kind
of suspended enigma. . . . Hempel, like some practical genius of
the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere
bric-a-brac, leavings, residue. It's astonishing how little she
needs to get something up and going on the page. A pun, a
malapropism, or a ghost rhyme is spark enough."
-James Wood, The New Yorker "Turning the pages [in Sing to It] is
like swimming in a lake and suddenly finding the bottom drop out
beneath you, leaving you to get your bearings amid unanticipated
depths."
-Ruth Franklin, The Atlantic "It's astonishing that Hempel can pack
so much emotion into so few words. . . . There's not a story in
Sing to It that's less than brilliant, and the collection itself is
even greater than the sum of its parts. Hempel occasionally draws
comparisons to authors like Mary Robison and Joy Williams, but she
writes like nobody else -- she's an irreplaceable literary treasure
who has mastered the art of the short story more skillfully than
just about any other writer out there. Sing to It is a quiet
masterpiece by a true American original."
-NPR Books "[Amy Hempel is] an essential voice in contemporary
American short fiction... [Sing to It] offers Hempel at her best:
oscillating between hilarity and pain in a way that feels utterly
human."
-TIME Magazine "Scintillating as the blade of a knife. . . . The
verisimilar quality of this storytelling is powerful. Ms. Hempel's
stories compel us to re-reading in much the same way we review (or
re-read) interactions in everyday life, attempting to piece
together what really happened, what was actually being said. . . .
When there is a shock, a crisis, a scene of horror, Ms. Hempel
sings to it, and the result is an exquisite collection by a master
of the genre."
-The Wall Street Journal
"Gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic
tales...Hempel is a master miniaturist, capturing in exquisitely
nuanced sentences the sensuous, cerebral, and spiritual cascade of
existence, homing in on pain and humor and the wisdom each can
engender."
--Booklist "Short story virtuoso Hempel's first collection since
2006 consists of 15 characteristically bold, disconcerting,
knockout stories that highlight her signature style with its
condensed prose, quirky narrators, and touching, disturbing,
transcendent moments."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A dizzying array of short
fiction...Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance,
longing, love, and loss. The brilliance of the writing resides in
the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her
narrator's reticence, teaching us to read between the lines."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[Hempel's] stories . . . burrow
inside you, dogging your thoughts for days. . . . Hempel has both a
better feel for the vicissitudes of the world and a better
imagination than you do."
-Cory Oldweiler, amNY
"Attention short story fans: Amy Hempel is back with her first
collection of short stories in over a decade. Some are just a page
long and others are like small novellas, but they're all
astonishingly rhythmic and textured."
-Hello Giggles
"Hempel packs a great deal into the briefest of fictions, creating
balanced and nuanced stories
of longing, love and loss."
--Bookpage
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