An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories
Ann Hood
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0393327043
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A collection of short stories that makes it possible to be proud to be human."―Carolyn See, Washington Post
Looking at her characters as if through a pair of binoculars, Ann Hood captures the extraordinary in the ordinary. A pregnant woman left by her husband cooks obsessively to cope with her loss, but never tastes a morsel. In an attempt to stay sober, a young alcoholic seduces her priest and embarks on a tour of caverns with him. An adolescent girl picks up bird-watching as a hobby and, in her newfound habit of observing others, discovers a budding romance between her mother and her neighbor. These stories, many published in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Story, and The Colorado Review, are full of characters seeking an escape from their lives while uncovering small moments of understanding that often have huge implications and consequences. They discover that they can only find peace once they stop searching for a way out. Through diverse voices and lively storytelling, Hood creates authentic, personal, secret worlds full of eccentric detail.
That was when I really started to cry. I had everything, I thought, feeling the strange flutterings of our baby’s first movements. Everything except Zane. WHEN I MET Zane, he and Alice had just split up. I had just split up with my boyfriend, Matthew, and had gone to Boston for the day to shop. Zane was in Crate and Barrel buying glassware. I was buying dishes. He came up to me, holding a wine goblet as if he were making a toast. “Your dishes,” he said, “and my glasses make a good combination.”
once we stumbled inside from the blazing Baltimore heat for more Popsicles or to complain about how bored and hot we’d grown, to find her sitting at our big wooden kitchen table, crying. All summer, this went on, until we stopped thinking about it and accepted it as part of the grown-up world our parents inhabited. Instead we focused on other things: stringing long strands of beads to hang in our doorway, monitoring the growth of a litter of newborn kittens who resided in our neighbor’s garage,
doesn’t look at her. Everyone is looking up at the ceiling. “Many people see the face of Jesus there,” Stuart says in his deep voice. Almost everyone is saying ah, and pointing. Martha clutches the bag of fireworks in her hands. Despite the colder weather down here in the cave, her hands are sweating. When she presses the bag close to her chest she feels the cool hard bottle inside. Reverend Dave is looking up too. Martha follows his gaze and tries hard to see the face of Jesus, but there is
the floor beside him. “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she says, weary. “Someday you’ll fall in love and maybe then you’ll understand.” “What a useless, ridiculous thing to say,” Elliot says. They sit like this a moment more, neither of them talking. Then his mother gets up, awkward again. He watches her carefully, her pig nose, her straight bangs and blunt hair. Her lips are chapped. Her nails are square. These things are all familiar, yet he does not know her. From the dangling
our son, Sam, whose love gives me strength. More Praise for An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life “I’ve been reading and writing for around 65 years now, and how can it be that I’ve never read anything by—or even heard of—somebody as wonderful as Ann Hood? . . . An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life is . . . an antidote to the vulgarity, love-of-violence and bone-dumb stupidity we tend to encounter every day. . . . These tales are unpretentious, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but all written