Book of the Week

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

Recommended by Mr Hager

'I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.'

Amy Hempel's new collection of short stories is an, at times, moving and provocative read. It is also a quick one.

Hempel is regarded as a minimalist, although she doesn't like the term because she feels it implies that plot and detailed emotion are required in normal fiction. She is famous for the precision of her sentences and for the ways in which she often achieves her effects without creating the standard story arc, or without obvious points of tension and conflict. Some stories might feel flat as a result, or might fail, but when they work there is a sense of something quite remarkable that has been created out of almost nothing. James Wood, writing in his New Yorker review, says, 'her stories assemble extraordinary sentences. And each purified sentence is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma.'

See if you agree, and let the Blog know which ones you thought were the best. The opening story alone is worth the price of the book, and there are other gems hidden away.

You'll also enjoy Hempel's characters' eccentricity, and the ways in which she uses the humorous and the mundane. There's a story that approaches the civil rights movement, for example, through the artwork 'Doll Tornado' that has divided critics.

If you're someone who likes to define things, then read some of Hempel's stories and decide what constitutes a short story, or a poem, or a prose poem. There's a lot of food for thought here, and some of the stories are compact enough to fit into the time between a lesson, and certainly into a couple of Pauline lunchtimes.