Reply All: Stories(Break Away Books)

A "touching and funny" story collection full of "sympathetic characters who are deeply flawed but just as deeply human"(Booklist). Reply All, the third volume of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception. A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave every day; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chief's words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks he's fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own righteous nobility when it hires a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcasts a not-so-secret affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets. Humans fool themselves in infinite ways, and these stories illustrate this sad fact in excruciating detail, knowing commiseration, and blushing recognition. "Laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad and deeply in touch with the profound humanity underneath the increasingly bizarre surface of our culture." --Robert Olen Butler, author of Good Scent from a Strange Mountai

About the Author :
Robin Hemley is Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and author of eight books. His essays and fiction have been published in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.

Review :
"In this collection of stories, Reply All, Robin Hemley continues to be a literary phenomenon, dazzlingly incapable of one dull or inelegant thought, of anything less than a tender yet adamantine wit. No social vagary, no human yearning, theologic or profane, no human behavior, pathetic, comic or sublime, escapes Hemley's mercurial intellect or compassionate reach. Individually and cumulatively, the stories in Reply All charm us with their magnificent range. This is a polyphonic, wild, irresistible collection, grafted of divine madness and worldly grace." --Melissa Pritchard, author of Disappearing Ingenue, Late Bloomer and The Odditorium.--Melissa Pritchard, author of Disappearing Ingenue, Late Bloomer and The Odditorium. "Reply All is a thrilling collection: laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad and deeply in touch with the profound humanity underneath the increasingly bizarre surface of our culture. And one of the basic great things about this book is that it brilliantly demonstrates the paradox of art: if you embrace the zeitgeist with compassionate humanity and finely observed detail, you end up writing a book that will endure. Reply All will endure." --Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories--Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories "Oh how I love Robin Hemley's stories. Reply All is a thrillingcollection: laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad and deeply in touch with theprofound humanity underneath the increasingly bizarre surface of our culture. Andone of the basic great things about this book is that it brilliantly demonstratesthe paradox of art: if you embrace the zeitgeist with compassionate humanity andfinely observed detail, you end up writing a book that will endure. Reply All willendure. You can put that in an email and send it to everybody." -- Robert OlenButler author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories--Robert Olen Butler author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories "Robin Hemley's effervescent new collection, Reply All, spritzes, poppingall that's Pop in these surprising innovative fictions. No one knows better thanHemley how to transform the dross all around us into such toothsome gold. As withBarthelme before him, Hemley is on the leading edge of the junk phenomena -- turningclich inside out, reinvigorating everything, making even the worn-out newness of"new" new again. Reply All is the raucous made sublime, the juxtapositionjuxtaposed..." -- Michael Martone, editor of Not Normal, Illinois (IUP2009)--Michael Martone, editor of Not Normal, Illinois (IUP 2009)