Amy Hempel is an American short story writer celebrated for her spare, impactful prose and her ability to evoke profound emotion with minimal words. Her work often grapples with themes of loss, memory, and fractured human connections, delivered with unflinching honesty. Through her journalism and academic work, alongside her fiction, Hempel has established herself as one of contemporary American literature's most distinctive voices, compelling readers with stories that resonate long after the final page.
These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.
It is always "earthquake weather" in Amy Hempel's California, a landscape where everything can change without warning. Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.In a tubTonight is a favor to HollyCelia is backNashville gone to ashesSan FranciscoIn the cemetery where Al Jolson is buriedBeg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, RepGoingPool nightThree popes walk into a barThe man in BogotáWhen it's human instead of when it's dogWhy I'm hereBreathing JesusToday will be a quiet day