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Crazy Love
Publishers' Weekly and BooklistStarred Review:
Finalist for the Oregon Book Award KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION . ~ Edward Champion of the Washington Post: top-ten-books-of-2008: "…there are invaluable lessons here on how to take a wild idea and make it concise and enthralling. The collection contains unsettling allegories and gleefully imaginative premises. There isn’t a single story in here that doesn’t take some kind of narrative gamble. And while the dice-rolling doesn’t always pay off, it certainly remains hot in your hands. "
~ Ray Olson, May 15, 2009 Booklist top ten: "Seventeen strange stories ranging in tone from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous all look at love, which they depict, with all due respect, as fairly insane. What has us laughing to keep from crying on one page, vice versa the next."
~ Rick Kleffel: "She can hook you with just a few words and after that, you're on your own in the emotionally vivid worlds she creates. And for all the pain she wrests from her characters and thrusts in your face, for all the vivid anger and wrenching anguish she puts the reader through, there's a sort of clarity here that's positively cathartic."
~ L. Timmel Duchamp The American Book Review, "… imaginative, sharply observed collection of short fiction."
Finalist for the Oregon Book Award KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION . ~ Edward Champion of the Washington Post: top-ten-books-of-2008: "…there are invaluable lessons here on how to take a wild idea and make it concise and enthralling. The collection contains unsettling allegories and gleefully imaginative premises. There isn’t a single story in here that doesn’t take some kind of narrative gamble. And while the dice-rolling doesn’t always pay off, it certainly remains hot in your hands. "
~ Ray Olson, May 15, 2009 Booklist top ten: "Seventeen strange stories ranging in tone from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous all look at love, which they depict, with all due respect, as fairly insane. What has us laughing to keep from crying on one page, vice versa the next."
~ Rick Kleffel: "She can hook you with just a few words and after that, you're on your own in the emotionally vivid worlds she creates. And for all the pain she wrests from her characters and thrusts in your face, for all the vivid anger and wrenching anguish she puts the reader through, there's a sort of clarity here that's positively cathartic."
~ L. Timmel Duchamp The American Book Review, "… imaginative, sharply observed collection of short fiction."
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
38 people want to read
About the author
Leslie What
55 books13 followersLeslie What has worked as a charge nurse, low-income lunch room manager, bee-butt sucker at a health food warehouse, and tap-dancing gorilla. She is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a Red Army deserter, and is a Nebula Award-winning writer who has published in Midstream, Perigee, The Clackamas Review, Fugue, Asimov's, Parabola, Lilith, Vestal Review, The MacGuffin, SciFiction, and other magazines. and over twenty anthologies.
NEWS! Crazy Love (Stories) earns Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist and was an Oregon Book Award Finalist.
"Queen of Gonzo" What (Olympic Games) drags love out of its gooey, schmaltzyrut and takes it for a joyride in this exuberant collection of 17 stories. "Finger Talk" is a poignant take on unwanted pregnancy and cavalier men. "Babies" gives a Kafkaesque touch to a pregnancy that may or may not have been affected by pesticides during the first trimester. "All My Children" asks whether the provider of a sperm sample is legally responsible for the children that come from its use - and if he is, how does he pay for 10,000 college tuition fees? The 1999 Nebula-winning "The Cost of Doing Business" posits possibly the most incredible premise in the book: a love for others that is completely selfless and nonjudgmental. No matter how brief or long, no matter how bizarre, each tale in this collection grabs readers and demands they rethink how they see all the myriad forms of love.
-May 12, 2008 Publishers Weekly
An ace at the new weirdness defined by the anthology Feeling Very Strange (2006), What uses it to be creepy, polemical, and funny, all at once or in various blendings. These 17 stories progress from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous without ever derogating their common subject, love, though they do depict it as fairly insane. The opening stories, "Finger Talk" and "Babies," feature women in abusive relationships they don't want to change; that one is trapped in a gorilla suit and the other is, unbeknownst to hubby, carrying sextuplets leavens their dire circumstances some, but enough? "The Cost of Doing Business" is about a professional victim, whose clients must be able to afford her subsequent hospitalizations and quite adequate comfort between jobs. Things lighten up through the predicaments of a man who masturbated for science when 18 and at 49 discovers he has thousands of offspring, a man who realizes that work doesn't proliferate during vacation without cause, a nauseating senior who expects familial love although he intends to live forever, and others, until at last there is the hermit researcher's tale, from which we learn, through a vale of our own tears of laughter, why there are always hermits. Love is why, of course. Crazy!
Ray Olson ~July 10 Booklist
NEWS! Crazy Love (Stories) earns Starred Reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist and was an Oregon Book Award Finalist.
"Queen of Gonzo" What (Olympic Games) drags love out of its gooey, schmaltzyrut and takes it for a joyride in this exuberant collection of 17 stories. "Finger Talk" is a poignant take on unwanted pregnancy and cavalier men. "Babies" gives a Kafkaesque touch to a pregnancy that may or may not have been affected by pesticides during the first trimester. "All My Children" asks whether the provider of a sperm sample is legally responsible for the children that come from its use - and if he is, how does he pay for 10,000 college tuition fees? The 1999 Nebula-winning "The Cost of Doing Business" posits possibly the most incredible premise in the book: a love for others that is completely selfless and nonjudgmental. No matter how brief or long, no matter how bizarre, each tale in this collection grabs readers and demands they rethink how they see all the myriad forms of love.
-May 12, 2008 Publishers Weekly
An ace at the new weirdness defined by the anthology Feeling Very Strange (2006), What uses it to be creepy, polemical, and funny, all at once or in various blendings. These 17 stories progress from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous without ever derogating their common subject, love, though they do depict it as fairly insane. The opening stories, "Finger Talk" and "Babies," feature women in abusive relationships they don't want to change; that one is trapped in a gorilla suit and the other is, unbeknownst to hubby, carrying sextuplets leavens their dire circumstances some, but enough? "The Cost of Doing Business" is about a professional victim, whose clients must be able to afford her subsequent hospitalizations and quite adequate comfort between jobs. Things lighten up through the predicaments of a man who masturbated for science when 18 and at 49 discovers he has thousands of offspring, a man who realizes that work doesn't proliferate during vacation without cause, a nauseating senior who expects familial love although he intends to live forever, and others, until at last there is the hermit researcher's tale, from which we learn, through a vale of our own tears of laughter, why there are always hermits. Love is why, of course. Crazy!
Ray Olson ~July 10 Booklist
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 1, 2014
I came across this book randomly while pulling other books, and when the cover proclaimed Leslie What as a Nebula winner, I was surprised I hadn't ever heard of her. This volume of stories includes the 1999 Nebula-winning "The Cost of Doing Business," which centers around the concept of a society that allows surrogate victims.
In general I found the stories to revolve around babies, relationships, pregnancies, parents, and love that transcends death and transformation. There is a twinge of fantasy or slight improbability in most stories, but other than in The Wereslut of Avenue A and The Jellyfish Man Keeps A-Rolling, the fantasy isn't the main point of the story. It's the relationships.
While there are too many pregnancy story lines for my tastes, I still felt these stories were worthwhile. They are well-crafted and the author is not afraid of a shocking idea.
Discussed on Episode 5 of the Reading Envy podcast!
In general I found the stories to revolve around babies, relationships, pregnancies, parents, and love that transcends death and transformation. There is a twinge of fantasy or slight improbability in most stories, but other than in The Wereslut of Avenue A and The Jellyfish Man Keeps A-Rolling, the fantasy isn't the main point of the story. It's the relationships.
While there are too many pregnancy story lines for my tastes, I still felt these stories were worthwhile. They are well-crafted and the author is not afraid of a shocking idea.
Discussed on Episode 5 of the Reading Envy podcast!
July 3, 2008
A "slim volume," Kate Wilhelm calls this in the introduction, but you could have fooled me. Its 195 pages are packed with stories that range from touching to unsettling, haunting to quirky; seventeen stories that keep you not only entertained, but thinking. What's narratives drive ahead, make you continue to read and guess. They are disturbing, funny, and very very brave.
March 22, 2009
At least the cover was honest - it warned me straight up that these stories could be disturbing... and they were. Not all, but most considered an aspect of love that was outside our normal consideration of "love". I liked that premise - I do believe love takes many, often unconsidered forms, some disturbing, etc. But the premise didn't deliver as promised, exploring the issues on a mostly surface level.
One really "disturbing" thing was the number of typos. The author should really hire a better editor. Seriously.
One story that I really liked was the one about the office machines and supplies having sex. I thought that was hilarious. It was probably my favorite, and made reading the book worthwhile.
One really "disturbing" thing was the number of typos. The author should really hire a better editor. Seriously.
One story that I really liked was the one about the office machines and supplies having sex. I thought that was hilarious. It was probably my favorite, and made reading the book worthwhile.
July 16, 2012
Disturbing, funny, odd, interesting. So many strange little short stories about love in many different forms. Definitely a book that you can just pick up and read at random, and not all at once! Please don't try, I think your heart and brain would explode.
May 19, 2011
"This is a really cool collection of exciting short love stories. They are refreshing, new, surreal, yet oh so real."
May 16, 2010
Went to the library for a book I had on hold and ended up grabbing this too based on the cover. I'm hoping it's a quick read I can knock out in a day. I have other books that I've been waiting to read.
Didn't really enjoy this collection. Don't find the writing particularly good. In some cases, it is even trite.
But I give her two stars for original content and for giving me the inspiration for my own short story.
Didn't really enjoy this collection. Don't find the writing particularly good. In some cases, it is even trite.
But I give her two stars for original content and for giving me the inspiration for my own short story.
Read
October 14, 2009This belongs on GUTG (intoned in a perky, Rachel Rayeque EVOO! voice) because I've been skimming it, found myself getting an Aimee Benderesque literary hangover, and will skim the remainder without much hope that matters will improve. This superficial approach to reading sure saves time!
January 7, 2013
I almost always have mixed feelings about short story collections, and this one is no different in that regard. There were some stories I just couldn't get into and a couple that made the time I spent reading the book worthwhile.
Read
April 14, 2010This book gets no stars because it was highly upsetting to me, but not in a good way. Yuck.
July 22, 2016
Some of these stories I didn't get into, but it's all made up for by "Paper Mates" on page 110.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews