All Over

by Roy Kesey

book data

43 ratings, 4.12 average rating, 9 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		44%
4		25%
3		27%
2		2%
1		0%

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published

October 23rd 2007 by Dzanc Books

binding

Perfect Paperback

isbn

0979312302 (isbn13: 9780979312304)

description

The debut story collection from Kesey includes 19 stories that have been published in literary journals such as Ninth Letter, McSweeney's and The Keny...more

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12/23/07

Dennis rated it:

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: anyone starved for good stories

It was my own fault.

See, I was only partially-prepared for the pleasure that awaited me--in reading Roy Kesey's debut story collection.

Halfway through, or thereabouts, I felt as though Gabo Marquez had gotten together with Kenneth Fearing, Kurt Vonnegut and Franz Kafka in my brain pan, for collaboration on a manifesto that not even any of those guys know where it's gonna go. By the time I finished reading, suffice it to say that I'd cracked up, misted up, scratched my he...more

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01/17/09

John rated it:

bookshelves: fun-fanatasy-sf, novellas--edgy---magnificent, short-story-masters, superb-minatures

Read in September, 2008

recommended to John by: Best American Short Stories, '08
recommends it for: readers who like a laugh, a shock, a challenge

Uproarious yet unsettling, Roy Kesey's first collection of stories combines a joshing respect for the forms he appropriates -- he has fictions based on everything from the job interview (“Interview”) to the international crime thriller (“Follow the Money”) -- w/ a phrase-coining shamelessness. Again & again ALL OVER shoots booming through the cliché barrier into the electrifying pleasures of language off the chain. He works in Americana, deadheaded & mall-worthy, & also in high rhetori...more Uproarious yet unsettling, Roy Kesey's first collection of stories combines a joshing respect for the forms he appropriates -- he has fictions based on everything from the job interview (“Interview”) to the international crime thriller (“Follow the Money”) -- w/ a phrase-coining shamelessness. Again & again ALL OVER shoots booming through the cliché barrier into the electrifying pleasures of language off the chain. He works in Americana, deadheaded & mall-worthy, & also in high rhetorical tones, almost Elizabethan here, high-Modernist there. Yet for all that the style's worth savoring, there's plenty more to gape at, amid these flash-fictions, stories of ordinary length, & novellas. That longer work includes a Best American winner, the transcendent "Wait," an epic set at an airport gate. “Wait” develops into a showpiece drama, w/ admirable complications, seductive & ingenious. It’s a picaresque that goes nowhere, an apocalypse full of hilarity (though a scene about burnt toes can fetch tears), & a transgressive romance, bashing across borders of race and more, in which its climactic marriage is also, in its way, one of convenience. Whew. Then there's “Fontanel,” another gem of some heft, working through an old-fashioned Godlike narrator in a new-fangled arrangement that makes its events all the more hair-raising. I have a few misgivings, sure, a case or two in which a bizarre framework & imaginative leaps overwhelm humbler connections. Sill if weary catchalls like "postmodern" or "experimental" have any cachet left, you'll catch its intoxicating whiff in ALL OVER. You can't help thinking, even, of Donald Barthelme, that po-mo touchstone. Kesey, overall, comes as close to Don B. as anyone has during the last couple of decades, though God knows the mad scientists of our literature have never ceased their efforts to cook up a replicant. But to suggest that the accomplishment of ALL OVER depends on any one earlier author would be to diminish what Roy Kesey himself has done: hilarious, startling, & -- actually -- gorgeous.

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04/17/09

Heather Fowler rated it:

bookshelves: people-i-know

I have always enjoyed Roy Kesey's narrative voice--clever and funny in turns, just as it is poignant. This book of stories was a joy to read. I'd recommend it for anyone who likes Tim O'Brien blended with Borges, blended with that special spark of style that's all Roy Kesey. For lovers of lovers and lovers of stories, I do recommend this book. Kesey had me in his hand. He didn't drop me.

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01/22/08

Tania rated it:

bookshelves: just-read-and-loved

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Tania by: Dzanc books
recommends it for: fans of sharp, clear, minimalist writing which plays with language

My review is up on The Short Review at http://www.theshortreview.com/reviews/Ro... along with more reviews of short story collections and anthologies.

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