Carlson's writing, particularly of late with five skies and the signal, is linking a chain to in the style of hemingway and carver. It's contemporary and relevant, but a wink to that time of spare, evocative style not dependent on metaphor stacked on metaphor, but rather elegant, mater of fact de...
Welcome to the short stories of Ron Carlson, where strange beach towels turn up in your suburban living room; where the ordinary son of a family of geniuses spins a rollicking tale of happiness and disappointment; and where a desperate ex-con with a broken heart must hide out in a desert hotel, o...
Ron Carlson's stories come at us from all directions. Sometimes wicked or bittersweet, often zany, they are rich with a hard-earned hopefulness frequently absent in contemporary fiction. In this generous gathering from collections no longer available, longtime fans and new readers alike can savor...
In his new collection of quirky, bittersweet stories, Carlson observes the men and women of the middle class, people who find themselves settling uneasily into lives they never envisioned for themselves. Carlson uncannily captures the complexity of his characters' inner lives.
NOTE: This review is for a single story in this collection."I haven't lied to you this far, and I'm not going to start now."I got this to read "Keith"; I saw the movie based on this short story recently. To say I loved the movie is a gross understatement, so I was naturally curious about the stor...
In this tender, comic novel, Larry Boosinger—graduate student, writer, garage attendant, escaped convict (and perhaps a person)—has one foot in late adolescence while he searches frantically for a place to put the other. Beset by illusions, attracted by paradoxes, Larry carries on his allegorical...
In this funny, touching collection of stories, the characters are regular, everyday types who love their families and lead honest lives. And it is just this ordinariness that makes them special. In The H Street Sledding Record, a man throws horse manure on his roof every Christmas Eve to keep the...
"If you can read this one without getting a lump in your throat, turn yourself in to the nearest mortuary. Your heart has ceased to function. This book is about the innate hunger of the human heart to belong. To be part of a family unit whether or not there are blood ties. It's about the refusal ...
No events or persons are real. Some of the place names, mountains, and fish are real, but I have moved them around in writing the story. Also I’ve made the fish a little bigger than they actually are. This is hope at work, an elemental feature of storytelling. I wish to thank Roger Day who showe...
He wears glasses, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wool slacks, and shined black shoes. Under his arm he carries a folded tablecloth. It is very large. He is also carrying a folding desk lamp, a pointer, and a packet of other small gear. The man, Leonard Christofferson, pins the tableclo...
The big red SUV felt huge on the little streets now, a lumbering gargantuan machine from the future come to visit and terrify the past. He was going twenty and speaking to each of the houses, saying goodbye and goodbye, “and though you will see me around for a while, by next year you will look fo...
or “eleven fatalities”—in fact, the word eleven now had that association first, the number of the dead—and in all the major league base-ball parks his full name could be heard every game day in some comment, the gist of which would be “Popcorn and beer for ten-fifty, that’s bad, but just be glad ...