Review by Booklist Review
When we refer to something as dreamlike, we often think of its imaginative nature: vivid and creative imagery, unexpected prose, nonlinear plots. Yet, dreams can just as often take us to uncomfortable or even horrific places; they can be frustrating, uncanny, and violent. In Irish author Hayden's first collection, his 20 stories are dreamlike in every sense of the word. In the opening story, a man jumps out the window of his office building, only to continue falling for years; while falling, he sleeps, calmly observes the world, and occasionally (and rather graphically) relieves himself. A later story centers on a dinner party where the long-awaited main course is a smoking human corpse. Some stories build to a resolution, while others just serve as vignettes with no clear beginning or ending. Hayden has a poet's ear for language, and his flair for description serves readers well; his prose is rich with color and sound, and the resulting imagery is vibrant and compelling. However, the uneven pacing and lack of narrative may ultimately leave readers frustrated.--Winterroth, Amanda Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The surreal and the mundane coincide brilliantly in Hayden's inventive debut collection. The first story, "Egress," follows a man who steps off a building through his yearslong journey to the sidewalk. In "The Bread that Was Broken," a fancy dinner party centers its attention on a dead man, roasted whole in his sport coat on the dining table, a place card by his feet. The delightful "Reading" poses a man's theory about the afterlife: a person is sent into the world of the last book he or she read. The man only reads books like Goodnight, Moon to ensure his own eternal peace, encouraging others to drop their business books and magazines. In "How to Read a Picture Book," a squirrel named Sorry teaches a group of young children a few specific facts about books, telling them, "There are all those things that are right in front of you that you don't recognise. Things or ideas or feelings that you can't fit into what you know." Hayden's work is strange and at times disconcerting, but with touches of the familiar. This collection is a joy to puzzle over. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Short stories that will puzzle, perplex, and provoke.Irishman Hayden's first book is a collection of 19 stories that invite readers into some puzzling and unfamiliar places: symbolic, surrealist, and language-based worlds. His tales are reminiscent of his countryman Samuel Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing. Hayden's book might be subtitled Texts with the Stories Gone. "Dick" is drawn directly from the Beckett playbook. It begins: "Dick is buried up to his belly on a cold shingle beach." Little happens; descriptions of the surroundings are given. "He laughs. He is full of words. They bubble out of his mouth and dribble down his chin." Hayden eschews conventional plots, characters, and narrative flow for ambiguity and words. Striking images and metaphors and new, compound words"thatmakes," "andeverything"abound. He invites readers to participate, to peel back the prose, reveal the very process of reading. "Reading" imagines readers as writers living in their own books. As the eponymous narrator of "The Auctioneer" tells us: "The essence of the book is another thing entirely, not the words as such but what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free." Some stories have a fairy-tale quality to them, like "How to Read a Picture Book." Meet Sorry the Squirrel"My real name is Maximilian Liebowitz," he says, "but you wouldn't be able to pronounce that now, would you kiddies?" He instructs a group of "little darlings" on how to read a picture book. Some stories possess a grisly, Brothers Grimm quality. In one, a platter with the "blackened, smoking corpse of a man" is on display at a dinner party. Another begins: "My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me." In the ghostly "Memory House," the narrator keeps seeing (maybe) a stranger in his house or maybe it's himself, a "piece of me."Those seeking challenging, nontraditional wordplay stories will find much here to ponder. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
