What do you think?
Rate this book
Bride, Groom, Sunday, Forever and Other Stories
Bride, Groom, Sunday, Forever depicts the unusual on-stage wedding of Stanley and Muriel, in which guests are invited to a dilapidated theater for a casual ceremony of skits, speeches, and humorous confessions tracing the history of their relationship. Along with whimsical play-acted depictions of the young bride and groom's romance―as well as an interview with their "future child" and a gag conversation with a psychologist who reduces their love to strict biological terms―come unrehearsed, pointedly honest testimonials by friends which reveal the couple's deepest secrets and fears. In the space of two hours Stanley and Muriel experience hilarity, embarrassment, raw truthfulness and passion, culminating in some sudden and surprising revelations. In presenting themselves to the world as honestly as they can before confronting married life, their ultimate challenge becomes to simply emerge at the end of the ceremony cleansed enough and determined enough to face the uncertain but boundless future.
Paperback
Published March 20, 2003
7 people want to read
About the author
Soren Narnia
45 books148 followersSoren Narnia's books are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that anyone is free to adapt them as they see fit, even for profit, without the obligation to compensate the author.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 7, 2017
If only she had known of the extraordinary thoughts that came to him two miles outside of town, thoughts of destroying every barrier that ever existed between reality and dream, thoughts of turning and going back to her despite the impossibility of it, an act of utter logical defiance which would show to mankind what had never been shown before: that any story could become a love story, including one like theirs.
A perfectly sized, relatively slim collection of short-stories by an author who I find to have wonderfully original ideas. Bride, Groom, Sunday, Forever and Other Stories is a collection that packs a lot of emotion, some humor, and some very beautiful writing. The titular story, in fact, contains much of the humor of the book though there is a sense of melancholy that courses through each story, some dashed with hopefulness, others with regret.
My personal favorite of the group is a story called Adelaine, a story about a Department of Defense operative attempting to extract a manuscript from his mark while encountering the mark's daughter. Beautifully written, and exciting from beginning to end.
Others of note are:
Two Writers: After years of separation two writers who had originally met in a workshop and had thought they'd seen the end of each suffer a reunion on a winter night.
Findings of the Commission: A sorrowful lament from a man who was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 90 people on board Earth's first passenger shuttle, in the form of a public address.
Straggler: The other somewhat comedic piece, these are the journal entries of a man who, after a plague wipes out 98% of the human population, begins to keep a diary in order to inform any alien visitors of who we were as a race.
Interestingly, the collection has very consistent themes of star-crossed love, loss, abject failure, companionship, and mourning what was once had but is now lost. Despite this rather dark and brooding tone that hangs over the book, several of the stories are hopeful, and they suggest that it is not the flaws or failure that define the individual, but how they continue in their lives in the face of that loss and hardship. A good read, and one that I was happy to track down, especially for Adelaine.
He came so close, so close, but only the dreamers and the enemies of sanity could keep him moving back to the girl, to let slip the laws of dramatic reason and plausible endings, to ignore fiction's immutable will. To melt the snow into an impossible spring. To keep the words on a thin white page trading onward until they finally found a summer which the author did not have the courage to conceive.
A perfectly sized, relatively slim collection of short-stories by an author who I find to have wonderfully original ideas. Bride, Groom, Sunday, Forever and Other Stories is a collection that packs a lot of emotion, some humor, and some very beautiful writing. The titular story, in fact, contains much of the humor of the book though there is a sense of melancholy that courses through each story, some dashed with hopefulness, others with regret.
My personal favorite of the group is a story called Adelaine, a story about a Department of Defense operative attempting to extract a manuscript from his mark while encountering the mark's daughter. Beautifully written, and exciting from beginning to end.
Others of note are:
Two Writers: After years of separation two writers who had originally met in a workshop and had thought they'd seen the end of each suffer a reunion on a winter night.
Findings of the Commission: A sorrowful lament from a man who was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 90 people on board Earth's first passenger shuttle, in the form of a public address.
Straggler: The other somewhat comedic piece, these are the journal entries of a man who, after a plague wipes out 98% of the human population, begins to keep a diary in order to inform any alien visitors of who we were as a race.
Interestingly, the collection has very consistent themes of star-crossed love, loss, abject failure, companionship, and mourning what was once had but is now lost. Despite this rather dark and brooding tone that hangs over the book, several of the stories are hopeful, and they suggest that it is not the flaws or failure that define the individual, but how they continue in their lives in the face of that loss and hardship. A good read, and one that I was happy to track down, especially for Adelaine.
He came so close, so close, but only the dreamers and the enemies of sanity could keep him moving back to the girl, to let slip the laws of dramatic reason and plausible endings, to ignore fiction's immutable will. To melt the snow into an impossible spring. To keep the words on a thin white page trading onward until they finally found a summer which the author did not have the courage to conceive.
December 14, 2022
Very funny and sad. Beautifully written.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews