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Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 · rating details · 4,002 ratings · 736 reviews

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island to shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A kid runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

In th...more

Paperback, 240 pages

Published April 1st 2010 by Granta Books (first published March 17th 2009)

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Sep 09, 2011 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, favorites

You know that dizzy, clammy feeling just after you've gotten really infuriated with someone and exploded into a fit of dismal, futile nastiness by saying something sadistic and clever and perhaps even true enough--to them, at least--that, regardless, cuts straight to the bone of the listener, causing you almost immediately afterward to break out into a full body attack of hives and dripping sweat, heart suddenly hammering, as you watch that person spontaneously combust before your very eyes, lea...more

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Mar 29, 2012 Stephen M rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 3-cheers-4-complex-characters, lifes-too-short-for-novels

This book is floating between three and four stars.

For the most part, the characters that Wells Tower casts in his debut short story collection are pretty awful people. A few of his protagonists include estranged brothers, cheating spouses and pedophiles; never before have I felt such anger and discomfort towards characters in a story. Yes, I, Stephen M of goodreads, empathizer with the lowest of the low—am I a bad person for IDing with Humbert Humbert?—felt nothing but scorn for the people of E...more This book is floating between three and four stars.

For the most part, the characters that Wells Tower casts in his debut short story collection are pretty awful people. A few of his protagonists include estranged brothers, cheating spouses and pedophiles; never before have I felt such anger and discomfort towards characters in a story. Yes, I, Stephen M of goodreads, empathizer with the lowest of the low—am I a bad person for IDing with Humbert Humbert?—felt nothing but scorn for the people of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. I think if I were a writer, I would take this as a compliment. Well Wells should because it is not easy to provoke that kind of reaction from the reader. The fact that such an emotion came out of me says he accomplished a lot, but that’s not to say that I loved every page. I don’t think there’s any dispute that this book is written terrifically. The prose is sharp, to the point and occasionally dazzling. Tower has a great deal of formal skill, he knows how to tell a story well, develop his characters, leaves much to the reader to divine, and blasts through the checklist that you’d find in any good creative writing class.

That being said, Tower doesn’t reach nearly as far as his skill warrants. He tells small stories—in length and scope—that hardly reach beyond the interpersonal drama of two brothers and a hunting trip or an old man, a drug dealer and her apartment. His stories accumulate small flares of momentum but by the time it hits an interesting stride, the story ends, essentially killing the build-up. I attribute a portion of this to the short story format, but it is more so apparent in these stories that Tower knows how to set up a story, bring together intriguing threads yet knows little of what to do with it once that has been achieved. It seems that Tower holds himself back when another author would take a step forward, take a risk. I’m curious to hear about Tower’s writing process especially w/r/t to the cuts he imposes on his material. Some of these stories were probably much broader, sloppier and unfocused—first drafts—than the final products. I’m at a point in my reading where I almost prefer an ambitious story, even if it's sloppy over a story that is safe and perfect. I’m trying my best not to pigeon-hole Tower here, because his writing is a bit more daring than I’m giving it credit for. The two stories “Retreat” and “Wild America” are downright, five-star fantastic. But with the rest of the stories I felt antsy while reading them. Most stories, I anxiously twiddled my thumbs waiting for the story to really take off. When it finally would, the story would end.

(If you’d like to attribute all these opinions to the fact that read this cushioned between Infinite Jest and V. then that’s probably fair).

I certainly understand the hype around his writing but it was not enough for me. Tower is a five star writer that wrote a couple 3-2 star stories. I think that once he becomes more confident and ambitious, we will be in for a real treat. In the meantime, I had to sit patiently through a few bores and stories that weren’t all that special.

More than anything else, character is Wells’ strong point. As I’ve already mentioned, he can invoke such a response from me solely through character. That is saying a great deal. There’s a moment where a character is described so perfectly, with all the perfect detail, that it should have every writing teacher who has championed “show not tell” salivating from the mouth:

“I spotted my stepmother by the dry fountain, where she was watching some young people make a film. I left my cistern at my father's feet and jogged to her. Since I'd seen her last, Lucy had reached a new status of tiredness and age. Looking at her, ‘lady’ is what I thought, a word that summed up her sparse, dry hair, her mottled cheeks, her many clattering bracelets and her lipstick, an alarming coral shade leaking into fresh hairline rills around her mouth. Her right eye was bloodshot and brimming with brine. We embraced. All she wore against the chill was a lamé shawl over a flimsy black top, so thin I could feel the gooseflesh on her hard arms"

Compare that to something that a lesser writer (view spoiler) would write, “I spotted my stepmother, looking like a middle aged house wife, wearing a few pieces of jewelry”. Bravo, Mr. Tower. Despite my reservations, I am downright giddy for your first novel.

(view spoiler)(less)

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Oct 07, 2011 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories-are-your-friends

Style. It’s amazing. I mean to say, we all have the same English language with its million plus words available to us, it’s open 24 hours a day, you have already been given a free lifelong subscription. How is it that some writers can put selections from those million English words which are permanently available to all the rest of us down in sentence after sentence so that it becomes more (much more) than prose, it becomes style. So that you read one page and you can say – oh, that’s James Ellr...more Style. It’s amazing. I mean to say, we all have the same English language with its million plus words available to us, it’s open 24 hours a day, you have already been given a free lifelong subscription. How is it that some writers can put selections from those million English words which are permanently available to all the rest of us down in sentence after sentence so that it becomes more (much more) than prose, it becomes style. So that you read one page and you can say – oh, that’s James Ellroy. Or Virginia Woolf. Or Philip Roth. Or Raymond Carver. Or Annie Proulx.

The critics, that gaggle of preening police informants, got it so right with this guy. They loved him, I loved him. I’ve been looking for a new short story genius since the sad Missing-In-Action fate of Thom Jones. Wells Tower is it.

This collection reads like it’s pieces of a giant, really giant, novel which in order to twine all the pieces of lives here presented together would be like 900 pages long. So, Wells, if you’re listening, do the right thing, take a few years off and WRITE IT! (Although that would kind of undermine my ongoing campaign to get the short story, the three minute single of modern literature, a little more profile.)

Because all the stories here (except one) are cut from the crazy cultural layercake that is contemporary America, the extraordinarily ordinary scenes of bad romances, sudden fights, pleasure and boredom, difficult brothers, ex-wives, stepfathers, tv, a little too much to drink, a little bit of dope, sexy cousins, places you really wouldn’t want to be, and of course places you really would like to be, for a week or two at least. Wait a moment – hasn’t that stuff been done to death already by all the other short story writers (Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Richard Bausch, Amy Hempel, the list goes on) not to mention all the good and not so good novelists of America of the last 40 years? Well, yes, so Wells Tower shows again that you take some guitars and a bass and drums, the same old instruments that they been using since the sixties, and you can still make magic. The magic doesn’t come from the guitars and the bad romances, it comes from you.

A few quotes may be in order at this point.

I was hoping I could sell the patent for a hundred thousand or so and then hurry to the Gulf Coast to cram a pontoon boat and a big-titted stranger into the hollow places in my heart. ( p70)

Jacey could not find a term appropriate for when a young girl is groaned on by a thirty-five year old lieutenant of the arts. ( p158)

She and Buttons lay there an hour and a half and mashed the lozenge eighteen times. The necking got fairly grave, but nothing irreparable took place. ( p163 )

Well, I had this boss. I’m telling you, if you asked me for an asshole, and I gave you that guy, you’d have owed me back some change. (p176 )

Stuff like that is festooned throughout these nine stories. There was only one I could have done without (the title story, as it happens, which is just a bit silly). Otherwise about half of them are going straight into the PB Hall of Short Story Fame.

Wells Tower. Highly unlikely. But it happened.
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Aug 27, 2008 Ryan Chapman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Tower's stories take place in the middle parts of America, which isn't to say the midwest - he takes on the bored teenagers, the divorced fathers, the estranged brothers. Except for the last two stories, "On the Show" and titular piece about Visigoths going through the motions of raping and pillaging, there's a fairly similar approach: we're invited into these people's domestic lives through their pitch-perfect verbs (what verbs! I'm telling you) and dialogue until a real sense of things is esta...more

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May 22, 2009 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: most everyone

Recommended to Mike by: D. M. Chan gave me an enthusiastic pitch

I heard all the buzz about Towers, and excitedly gulped down the one published in The New Yorker ("Leopard"), and decided it must be another false prophecy of the great new debut collection. That story was fine enough, but no more than fine (enough), and I quickly forgot it, and then passed by the book when it arrived on shelves, perused the flurry of glowing reviews with a knowing smirk.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A friend told me I had to read it, so to the library...more

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Apr 17, 2009 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Readers & writers

Recommended to Jim by: Submersion Journalism

In the title story of his debut collection, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," Wells Tower uses contemporary American idiom to tell the story of a Viking having second thoughts about his career as a plunderer and pillager.

We've seen reluctant detectives, hitmen and superheroes but never a foot-dragging sacker of cities. It's a weirdly empathetic and altogether unforgettable tale, but once you get past the absurdity of characters with names like Naddod the Norwegian Monk and Djarf Fairhair...more

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Apr 05, 2009 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"like trying to push a coin with your mind"..."a quivering halo of vermilion minnows"..."a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother's wrath"..."his tongue lolling like a tiki god in ugly throes"..."big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit"...

I'm going to have to find someone else to call "the best writer in America without a book to his credit" in too-loud, one-sided conversations now. Like very few writers I can think of (Leonard Michaels, Joy Williams, Karen Russell, Breece Panca...more

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Apr 10, 2013 notgettingenough rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, modern-lit

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres...

PS: I've just realised that the title to this might seem like the ultimate comment on what goodreads has done to itself. But I assure you, it is only coincidence. :)

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Apr 25, 2009 Elaine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: shortstorycollections

Not as impressive as I thought it would be -- given the rave reviews and the cachet of being picked up by Granta as well as his list of creds. Some of the stories have luminous scenes, and the prose is winsome, but I have to admit to a basic prejudice -- I expect more startling insights, deeper thematic renderings, more emotional involvement (pathos, male alienation, anything)and less run-of-the-mill average American male characters from any short story collection that manages to break through t...more

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Apr 13, 2009 Mick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked up this book because I've been trying to find short fiction by a living writer to read that wasn't boring as hell. (Too pretty, too literary, too preachy, too fake.) I rarely buy new short story collections, and hardly ever by writers I haven't heard of; but I have to admit I'm not entirely regretting buying this one.

Each story is steeped in a world that is fundamentally unfair. The characters are thrust (or they thrust themselves) into situations where the usual happy ending simply can...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Gerhardt Himmelmann rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Gerhardt by: Walter Rorschach

Shelves: read-2013

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a collection of nine exquisitely written literary short stories on a common theme—folks who are down on their luck. By ‘literary’, I mean that these stories follow the current fashion of presenting vignettes without using these short scenes to advance a plot. Personally, I strongly prefer stories that go somewhere, but in each of these, Tower seduced me with his beautiful words to look past that preference.

Tower’s characters are a grim bunch: a builder wh...more

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May 11, 2009 jo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to jo by: mike, with his review

Shelves: short-stories

this is pretty fabulous short story writing. maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely splendid. it's quite impressive, for one, that wells tower should have waited so long to put out a collection, piling up stories in this and that first-rate magazine seemingly with no hurry whatsoever, giving thus the impression of being after beauty and intensity of narration rather than a book. my friend mike compares these stories to flannery o'connor's but the only similarity i see, besides the extra...more this is pretty fabulous short story writing. maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely splendid. it's quite impressive, for one, that wells tower should have waited so long to put out a collection, piling up stories in this and that first-rate magazine seemingly with no hurry whatsoever, giving thus the impression of being after beauty and intensity of narration rather than a book. my friend mike compares these stories to flannery o'connor's but the only similarity i see, besides the extraordinarily precise, rich, and sensual use of language, is their intensity. tower is not interested, it seems to me, in messages. (o'connor is, though one tends to have no clue what the message is). maybe the title story, though, and that story's title come as close as anything to give us a sense of what this collection is about. by my count, there are three abused children (nothing graphic at all) and more children, some in flashback, whose childhood seems pretty blown; a number of youngish-to-middle-aged guys who have been taken by the currents of life to places they didn't really want to go, with no idea about what to do now that they are there; and a lot of non-protagonist characters with distinctly unhappy or unappealing lives.

yet the stories are not sad. they are very funny. they are veined with desolation, but not in a way that'll hit you, because they are not meant for identification but for distance.

maybe the distance comes from the humor and the preposterous language. lots of it comes from the intensity of the descriptions. language this beautiful and stark and desecratingly vernacular gives you 3 minutes of a startling film, not a feature-length story in which you can recognize yourself.

also as mike has observed, there is no psychology going on here. you can do the psychological work yourself, but tower is not after motivations and traumatic roots. the relentless superficiality – this determination to stay on the surface of things – is perhaps what makes these stories so stunning: surely these characters are coming from someplace horrid. surely we will be told what the horrid place they are coming from is. surely we will learn what afflicts them. tower doesn't satisfy.

except, there's a lot lovelessness. people not connecting. children left casually to themselves. people being mean and selfish in unexplained way, as if it were the most unremarkable thing in the world. it's as if tower had no desire whatsoever to raise our moral outrage. this is how it is. wanna laugh at it or what?

my favorites are “Executors of Important Energies,” “Down Through the Valley,” and “Everything Ravaged.”
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May 12, 2012 Benjamin Obler rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

From my 2009 Amazon Review.

I agree with another review here: The Times really piled it on, and made me expect the second coming of Cheever and Chekov combined. The stories were solid and unique but far from outstanding. I found them long on punchy word choices but short on depth. For example, bugs stuck to a truck's grill are "stuccoed" there; rather than waving an object in somebody's face, a character "wands" it, which isn't a verb and doesn't really make sense except by association, calling t...more From my 2009 Amazon Review.

I agree with another review here: The Times really piled it on, and made me expect the second coming of Cheever and Chekov combined. The stories were solid and unique but far from outstanding. I found them long on punchy word choices but short on depth. For example, bugs stuck to a truck's grill are "stuccoed" there; rather than waving an object in somebody's face, a character "wands" it, which isn't a verb and doesn't really make sense except by association, calling to mind the waving of a wand. The stories are long on these snappy stylistics, and short on emotional depth and glaringly lacking in demonstrating any real understanding of human emotional complexity. I'm not levelling that at Tower himself, but at the narratives. Everything about the characters is shown, or attempted to be shown, through action, props, events, and dialogue. This is not a technical fault, because plenty can be accomplished that way, but there is little richness between the lines. What do his bumbling, dysfunctional Floridian carnies feel? We don't know. The narrator doesn't know. Does Tower know?

The first story is the strongest. "On the Show" really baffled and even embarassed this reader, calling to mind the hallmarks of amatuer fiction so often encountered in workshops: episodes, events, and people connected by physical promixity but otherwise disunited by any thematic thread. It's the writers job to do a little bit of weaving, and that has been forsaken or skipped here. "On the Show" has an ending in which the material just stops, seemingly because the author ran out of stuff to have happen. The last sentence is a nutty image, like the dozens and dozens of images provided along the way, and the last one has no special resonsance for being the last. It reads like that Beck song on "The Information" where the drums just stop and the guitar strums a few more chords, and then you hear Beck at the soundboard answering a call from someone in the house: "What? Dinner? Oh, okay." Silence. Tower did his thing along the way, showing people sexually abusing a child, smoking herion out of tinfoil, being large like a giant, having a disagreement with a step-father. Hope you liked it, because that's what it was.

A lack of compassion for his characters and narrative ungenerousness from an author I find distasteful, especially when there is evidence of effort and intention in the quirky words choices. But in a barren emotional context, these verbal oddities come to seem like decorations in an empty room.(less)

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Sep 20, 2011 Sam Quixote rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wells Tower's first book is an interesting collection of stories showcasing a wide range of contemporary urban America. Tower shows his depth of character voices by writing from the varied points of view of disaffected young men, confused young boys, troubled teen girls, humourous old men, and medieval Vikings. This last one is the story to get peoples' attention, the gimmick, but is in fact the weakest. Tower's strengths are in contemporary settings and complex relationships. Most of the storie...more Wells Tower's first book is an interesting collection of stories showcasing a wide range of contemporary urban America. Tower shows his depth of character voices by writing from the varied points of view of disaffected young men, confused young boys, troubled teen girls, humourous old men, and medieval Vikings. This last one is the story to get peoples' attention, the gimmick, but is in fact the weakest. Tower's strengths are in contemporary settings and complex relationships. Most of the stories hold your attention but some of them were let down by "Literary" pretensions.

For example, in "Down Through the Valley", the finale is the narrator getting into a fight in a bar's parking lot. Just before he throws a punch though he remembers a dinner party! Then the fights over. Have you ever been in a fight? I promise you, these moments of Literary pretention do not happen. The climax of "Retreat" is the shooting of a moose while "Executors of Important Energies" has a son visiting his father who has Alzheimer's. I've read several stories which have both devices as major components of the story. It's what makes a story "worthy" of critical acclaim and reeks of self import.

"Wild America" is the only story here that really stands out for it's originality. Two cousins, once great friends, find they've grown apart in their teen years. A trip to the woods ends in a deeper rift between the two and, for one of them, an encounter with a strange man. This is probably the best story here. Measured writing, pitch perfect characterisation, and convincing dialogue, rolled up in an interesting story.

The other stories are readable but by no means different from any other stories you're likely to read in literary journals like McSweeney's, The Paris Review, or The New Yorker. That is, they're ok but forgettable.

It's an enjoyable collection by a good writer, on his way to becoming a great writer. Hopefully he'll stray from intentionally oblique endings that plague literary journals and write better stories. I'll definitely check back in when he writes another book though this one was filled with so so stories and not the dynamic ones you'd imagine from the advertising. (less)

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Jul 12, 2011 Barry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, read-in-2010

For me, this collection shows that Wells Tower is a master of words, a true talent with crafting some beautiful sentences, but for the most part, is still some way short of being a great storyteller. This may sound rather harsh - after all this is his first published collection - but with all the hype surrounding him currently, I can't help but expecting more from this book.

The stories are fast paced and as mentioned the language is wonderful, I had no trouble getting into a story and wanting to...more For me, this collection shows that Wells Tower is a master of words, a true talent with crafting some beautiful sentences, but for the most part, is still some way short of being a great storyteller. This may sound rather harsh - after all this is his first published collection - but with all the hype surrounding him currently, I can't help but expecting more from this book.

The stories are fast paced and as mentioned the language is wonderful, I had no trouble getting into a story and wanting to find out where it was going. Anger felt genuinely raw and violent, descriptive scenes made me feel like I was within the landscape, and I was even impressed that during one fight scene actual wrestling / BJJ terms and techniques were used (but this mainly stems from recently reading a short story where someone throws a 'Jiu-Jitsu Kick', err...). He also seems to have a good aptitude for writing as a child; these moments for me were easily the most interesting.

But this also leads on to a major issue I have with most of the stories in the collection, they feel disconnected within themselves at times, and have very unsatisfying endings. Take the story 'On The Show', without detailto avoid spoilers, it starts with two children at a carnival, meeting for the first time, along with a parent each who are going on a first date together. A major part of the story soon emerges involving one of the children, from which point the story changes to a carnival worker on the pirate ship, his story evolves somewhat, then it quickly jumps to a worker on a different ride momentarily, then back to the pirate ship guy, off to a cattle competition judge, and quickly back to pirate ship chap for a disappointing ending, which resolves near on nothing for any of the characters. Personally, while it seems rather fashionable to include these open endings in short stories, I find them rather unsatisfying, or at least when everyone bar one in a nine story collection ends like it.

The final story, the one which this book takes its title from, is the one most people will have heard about or already read, the one about the Vikings. In theory it is a sudden departure from the modern day tales, (which I don't have a problem with like some don't seem keen on) but in practice it feels much like the others, it's still about a young to middle age male living to survive, having family issues, and trying to decide what to do with his life. It certainly isn't true to any historical Viking history, yes the names are from that part of the world, but they speak perfect, modern English, and at least twice they are seen saying 'motherfucker', a term I highly doubt a Viking word use even in his native tongue. This is my favourite story in the collection for one simple reason, it has a ending! There is a nice introductory beginning, something happens in the middle, and you know what has happened by the end, not a 100% ending, you can still imagine in your mind how certain characters live afterwards if you so wish too, but not a loose ending which actually feels like it's about 65% through the story you want to hear, like the rest in this book.

While this collection has left me slightly underwhelmed, I am still very interested in what Mr. Tower does in future. I first read his story 'Raw Water' in 'The Best American Short Stories 2010' (originally published in McSweeney's) which isn't included in this collection. I don't know when that was written compared to the stories here, but I'd imagine after as it felt more connected, more of a actual story, and if he can grasp this vital skill then I have no doubt he can become a modern great as the press are currently pushing him as, but from this set alone, I don't see it.
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Nov 27, 2010 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: men, boys, other people who've known men or boys

Recommended to Jessica by: ricky raleigh; the hysterical press

Shelves: leetle-boys, wish-i-owned, dicklits

I know I'm late getting to this, but here I go and so far I gotta alert you others: believe the hype. This is fucking phenomenal.

****
I've been reading a lot of them lately so I think I'm qualified to complain that a good short story collection is hard to find. There is a lot of fairly good short fiction, and short fiction with good things about it, but actually finding an entire book of stories by one author that is solidly original and well-written and interesting and fresh is not something tha...more I know I'm late getting to this, but here I go and so far I gotta alert you others: believe the hype. This is fucking phenomenal.

****
I've been reading a lot of them lately so I think I'm qualified to complain that a good short story collection is hard to find. There is a lot of fairly good short fiction, and short fiction with good things about it, but actually finding an entire book of stories by one author that is solidly original and well-written and interesting and fresh is not something that happens too often to me. Actually a frenemy of mine told me to read this over a year ago, and I even got it out of the library then but didn't manage to open it before it was due back. Then about a month or two ago, I read some totally underwhelming Wells Tower story in the New Yorker, and so like Mike Reynolds, I was just kind of all, "meh, yeah whatever." I actually don't remember what did make me get this out of the library again, only holy shit, wow, I'm really glad I did! This is one of those books that totally deserved all the annoying hype. Again, I've been reading a lot of short fiction and the truth is that while there are some great stories out there, it's almost impossible for me to make it through an entire collection by one author. Very few writers have a voice or perspective that's compelling enough to shack up with for a series of unconnected but underlyingly similar episodes. And there are just so many traps for short stories: it's too easy for them either to be boring or else a bit maudlin and reliant on tragic cliches, or too painfully straining for eccentric whimsy (which I hate).

I can't remember if I've talked about this on here already, but earlier this year I was watching Mulholland Drive and trying to figure out what was so good about it. What I realized is that every line of dialogue in that movie, each shot, everything that happens, is either just a little or widely off what you're expecting. The movie heightens and exploits this by being set in this noiry genred world: since you sort of think you know what you're looking at, you're not expecting to be surprised, and Lynch shows I think good control for once in not making things so weird that you ever fully stop expecting that you know at least partly what to expect. Like, a lot of the times with his other stuff you're aware going in that it's all gonna be zany bizarro, but just being surprised doesn't provide that same immense thrill if you understand that that's what's scheduled to happen. It's the difference between seeing a sequined drag queen at the Halloween Parade and seeing one working in a hospital. Anyway, this is a total digression, and maybe it's an obvious point, but since then that's been my standard for evaluating a lot of movies and books. Does it feel real and coherent enough that on some level I think I know what to expect -- i.e., it's not just random silly craziness -- but then constantly destabilizes me by going somewhere I'm not expecting but am able to follow? Wells Powers does that in all of these stories. This book is cliche-free, and there's no sentence in here that you can guess is coming. I was never like, "Oh, another tragic divorced guy who drinks," or "Oh, another kids-are-so-cruel childhood reminiscence." Or rather, I was, but then what followed wasn't like anything I'd read before. I don't mean it was all over-the-top shocking, just that it was new. And that newness is what I'm after when I read contemporary fiction.

These stories are mostly about men, sad men, sad and troubled men, in a way that isn't like anyone else's sad troubled men stories. The sexy, hilarious prom king here is obviously the title story -- the last one in the book -- which, in case you haven't heard, is about FUCKING VIKINGS. This one's the joke that will keep on being funny forever, that works on so many levels, that you make your brothers read. I liked all the other ones too, and they were as good even without being as show-stoppingly flashy. I think my favorites were the first two, and "Door in Your Eye." There weren't any duds though. I totally recommend this volume, unless you yourself are trying to write short fiction, in which case it will probably just make you depressed about not being as talented as this guy. Maybe that's good, though. Maybe you should stop. After reading this I wondered if a lot of people should.(less)

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May 09, 2010 Trin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-lit, fiction, shortstories

The word I keep wanting to use to describe this short story collection is “masculine.” Customers give me weird looks when I do this. But I suppose it's still better than the other phrase I could use: “Whoa-ho-ho, hello, daddy issues!”

This is a collection all about manly men in the height of their manliness, doing manly things like hunting deer and having questionable affairs with questionable women, all while suffering from some seriously bad cases of Manpain (a.k.a. Mangst), and failing to conn...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads

Estranged wives, brothers, fathers. Losing jobs and relationships. Awkward interactions between adults and children (of all ages). Discontentment with everything, but especially oneself. And suddenly, out of nowhere, Visigoths? (Or Vikings, or something...) This is Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Full of great images, lots of entertaining little details. Very richly imagined, incredibly -- even terribly -- vibrant and descriptive.

But I was often left with the question "to what end?" Sure...more

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May 07, 2009 Cynthia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2009

The humor in this books sneaks up on you, somehow you're laughing without knowing why because the humor is so subtle you think *you're the only one who got the joke. The humor is endemic, it's part of the plot, and it feels inevitable. That's how good a craftsman Towers is.

So much of the plot turns on family and long standing relationships that cause knee jerk interactions. The people don't want to act petty or love so much but they do. One moment they're acting five years old the next they've...more

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Apr 07, 2009 Jessica marked it as stopped-reading · review of another edition

I stopped reading because I got too many holds at once, not because I didn't like it. Kind of a sleazier Tobias Wolfe. Would pick it up again.

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Mar 10, 2009 Shya rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'll dispense with the easiest bit of criticism first: though it is the titular story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" is actually the only story set in something other than what I fairly assume to be present day, the only story to stretch realism. (All the rest of these stories are basically slice of life, NYer realism, with tinges maybe of hysterical realism.) I don't think this is quite fair however, this critique, seeing as how it could very well have been Tower's publisher and/or ag...more I'll dispense with the easiest bit of criticism first: though it is the titular story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" is actually the only story set in something other than what I fairly assume to be present day, the only story to stretch realism. (All the rest of these stories are basically slice of life, NYer realism, with tinges maybe of hysterical realism.) I don't think this is quite fair however, this critique, seeing as how it could very well have been Tower's publisher and/or agent who ordered this collection, and chose what to include. Still, a strange choice, even considering the fact that such a title becomes emblematic of a basic kind of desperation and loss tucked deep within the characters of this collection.

As for the rest of the collection, or rather, "the book," if you go by a kind of exception-makes-the-rule perspective, there are certain things Tower is very, very good at. He's a master of the visual simile, for instance. At least once in every story--sometimes twice or three times--he comes up with something that, as a writer, fills me with that bittersweet mixture of enjoyment and envy. The kind of comparison that is at once completely disparate and yet totally right.

Another thing he's good at is creating gem-like little scenes that have the right balance of quirky, particular detail and familiar, straight description to make the reading quick and fluid yet improvisational and dreamy. The characters are invested in the scene, and bring a good measure of memory, abstraction, and analysis (though too many, perhaps, fail the kind of introspection you know Tower himself has, and this makes you wish he'd imbue his characters with more of their own).

So why only three stars? Well, basically, stars are bullshit. The short answer is I gave four stars, most recently, to Stoner, and this simply isn't that good, that mature, that wise. Tower is talented as fuck, but the biggest, most obvious shortcoming in this collection is that, for all their nimble blocking and deft characterization, the overall effect was wanting. I never felt like the primary characters had enough at stake (a terribly workshoppy thing to say, really, but there you go), and though there was driving force enough simply in the language of the stories, when they ended, I felt that not enough had been accomplished. It was really a consistent experience throughout the read, until the penultimate story, "On The Show," which basically did everything right.(less)

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May 05, 2013 jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A collection of short stories, most them having a central theme of a displaced male and often a bad father/son relationship. In "The Brown Coast", the death of a father causes a man's marriage to fall apart and sends him to stay at a rundown beach property where he begins capturing sea creatures. In "The Executors of Important Energies", a young man who has had little parenting from his father is forced to spend an evening with him now that mental decline has made the father little more than a c...more

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Aug 20, 2012 Smith Abbott rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The eponymous piece in this collection of archly sad stories is narrated by a Viking in contemporary American vernacular. What does that mean? EVERYTHING:

Across the road, an old dried-up farmer had come out of his house. He stared off at the smoke from the monastery rolling down across the bay. He nodded at us. We walked over.

“Hello,” he said. I told him good day.

He squinted at my face. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

“Apologies,” he said. “Just thought I recognized you, is all.”

“Could be. I was...more

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Aug 06, 2012 David Nelson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked up Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, by Wells Tower after hearing a piece on NPR that included a reading from the end of the final story, the title story, which follows a viking just approaching the doors of mid-life as he goes on his last raid. That ending is this:

. . . after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the thing

...more I picked up Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories, by Wells Tower after hearing a piece on NPR that included a reading from the end of the final story, the title story, which follows a viking just approaching the doors of mid-life as he goes on his last raid. That ending is this:

. . . after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to the, with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

The rest of the collection is nothing like this. The other stories are classic, quotidian literary short fiction: girl gets in a fight with her prettier cousin, guy gets booted out by his wife, kid hates his step-dad--sort of a restrained David Foster Wallace, and so self-similar that the collection verges on reading like a novel of parts. But read it all, read it in order, with the vikings last and that above paragraph as the closer, and it all clicks wonderfully, heartbreakingly, the bare violence of the viking lifestyle making clear the mundane destructiveness of well-tended lawns.

I've thought long on the problem of short story collections. I once read an interview where editors were complaining that they get these short story submissions that have no binding feature, "It's just like they wrote 20 stories and decided it was reason enough for a collection." I hear that, and took it to heart, but then think back on a collection of Ellen Gilchrist stories I read in college: A dozen or fifteen stories, but since she only really had one story to tell and one way to tell it, it ended up reading like jumbled reruns.

Point being: There's a balance in a short story collection, and it's a hard to articulate one. Tower's book is a good case study of the right way to do it. Beyond that, the stories are just plain good.
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Jun 05, 2012 Ariel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Ariel by: Jane

Shelves: short-stories

Noteworthy/memorable

The Brown Coast is a story about the beautiful and rare things in our lives, how much work they take to collect and how fragile they are. How quickly things can go wrong.

Leopard is a great little story about the boundaries between reality and imagination. Sometimes if you wish for something enough, it makes it true.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is the real standout in my opinion. The setting is historic but the language is modern and cutting. It deals with the benefit...more

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Nov 06, 2011 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fic-literary

Towers' stories are less about delivering a clean plot and more about dropping the reader into the middle of his characters' messy lives and watching them as they flail around. Most (but not all) of the stories are set in modern America, and, invariably, the people he writes about are losers, misfits, and the averagely dysfunctional. Towers has a gift for supple description and crunchy, lifelike dialogue, and his unironic narrative voice gives his stories a bleak humor that feels a little wrong...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If this is the beginning of a career, it's hella fine and bodes so well for the rest of his earthly time that I am thrilled and grateful he decided to write.

The nine stories in the collection are the products of much careful observation, writing, and re-writing, and that shows in their craftsmanship. There are very few infelicities of style on display here. But what doesn't show, what's invisible to the naked eye, is the muse-touch that brought Wells Tower to our shelves. He's not a writer made,...more If this is the beginning of a career, it's hella fine and bodes so well for the rest of his earthly time that I am thrilled and grateful he decided to write.

The nine stories in the collection are the products of much careful observation, writing, and re-writing, and that shows in their craftsmanship. There are very few infelicities of style on display here. But what doesn't show, what's invisible to the naked eye, is the muse-touch that brought Wells Tower to our shelves. He's not a writer made, he's a writer born. How dare I assess a stranger's character? I dare because there are only a few times in life when the hairs on one's neck stand up and the palms of one's hands moisten when someone not right there *feels* like they are.

Tower is a star. He writes beautifully. He imagines fully the characters he presents to us. These are craftsmanly things, things I can teach someone to do. What I can't teach someone to do is to see so deeply into the reality of another's life. That makes Tower very unusual.

In every story in this collection, there is something unexpected. The last story, set in Viking times, is a complete departure from the present-day fringes-of-society settings of all the others...but only at first glance. The characters in Tower's fiction are all men looking for meaning in all the socially sanctioned places and not finding it. I can't think of a more evergreen plot off hand. But these men all have one thing in common that isn't superficial. They are all wounded from within by anger.

An angry Viking...yeah, so? The Viking in question, however, is wounded by the anger he feels at change, at the world daring to shift him into a new place. Like the other Tower men, modern men, he feels cut off from his source of meaning and connection. I don't think this is anachronistic, because I think that's been a human experience since scientific-Adam fathered the first huge batch of modern human males.

Why read about angry men, I hear the ladies murmur, we see 'em all the time...yes, I know, but ask yourself this: Why is anger so male an emotion? Why are men so ticked all the time? Turn to fiction for your answers. Betrayal of the trust a man reposes in others is a biiig one ("The Brown Coast", "Wild America", "On the Show"), or the inability of humans to cope with change ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", "Door in Your Eye", "Executors of Important Energies")...in short, the same things that make women angry, right?

Not exactly. Tower's men, like the flesh-and-blood ones I know and love, are befuddled by the very fact of feelings. They aren't mad because you hurt their feelings, they're mad because you found them in the first place and THEN hurt them.

And they have no way to tell you this. So Tower had to do it for you. So he did. Go say your thank-yous at the cash register, buy his book, read it and apply your confusion to the real men in your life.(less)

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Aug 06, 2011 Ron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Tower has, at a very young age, written the most remarkable set of short stories I've read since David Foster Wallace's last collection. While he does share some things in common with Wallace--a gift for language and a curious sense of whimsy at the darkest of events--the stories mostly evoke the works of Raymond Carver and Russell Banks in that they explore the malaises so common to middle-aged men and end rather abruptly, with little fully resolved. Tower also uses metaphor masterfully, allowi...more

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Jul 13, 2011 Gaston rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

To preface, this was like, a 4.6, so I figured I would round up. Like many others, I was introduced to Mr. Wells via McSweeney's. While I enjoyed his story of the reconciliation of two brothers, there was something about his style that caused me to type his name in GR's search engine and discover he had a collection of short stories in print. I quickly added it to my 'to-read' collection, figuring one day I might order it on Amazon. Maybe.

Fast forward several months and guess what I find at a h...more

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Jun 20, 2011 Mykle rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Wells Tower's agent

I didn't read it all. I read the first story, which was your standard New Yorker story about a middle-aged middle-class guy doing something vague and poignant during a Major Life Moment. And I read the last story: the same but with Vikings. I'm not going to read the ones in between unless someone can convince me one of them is significantly better, or at least different.

I think Wells Tower is a super-talented writer in all the standard workshop areas. But there's something I don't get about why...more

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Mykle You could also just be more sensitive than me, or something. I don't mean to suggest that people who liked this book are wrong. I'm just not feeling t...more
Jun 24, 2011 11:40am

Eh?Eh! Nice! When I select books for myself, I fall into the Great Books category, feeling there are acknowledged classics that will completely blow my mind....more
Jun 24, 2011 03:39pm

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About Wells Tower

Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. In 2010 he was named as one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 brightest young writing talents.
He divides h...more

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“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.” — 3 people liked it

“The bell on the cat's collar roused her. He'd brought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey's pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute. -- Wild America” — 3 people liked it

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