[.ca] Corpus Christi: Stories (ISBN 0812971876)

Superior craftsmanship!:
Years ago I stopped buying short story collections as I found it to be like buying a CD by a favorite band: There would be the one, popular, Top 10 cut, then the rest of the music would be filler. I was encouraged by a writer-friend to read Corpus Christi and I have to say honestly that each and every story is a gem. This book made me laugh and weep and sing and dance--and weep again--sometimes in the sadness of the story, sometimes in joy at the gift of Johnston's writing. Long ago it seemed the literary world lost the vision of a short story with beginning, middle, end. Here the skill in such craftsmanship is reborn. Bret Johnston deftly chisels every sentence out of the substance that is his beloved medium: the written word. Thank the muses! If you love the short story as an art form, buy this book! You won't be disappointed.

Stunning:
A wonderful book. Sumptuously written with dialogue and detail that remind you of the beauty that is life. There are no "heroes" among these characters and stories...just people who bravely face their surroundings, not just physical (the inevitable hurricane) but emotional as well. There is loss. There is regret. There is everything that memory assails us with; but these stories also tell of what memory rewards us with. This may not be a book for the faint-hearted, for these characters are certainly not. They face their shining moments and imperfections with a grace and courage that makes you glad to know their stories.

A Must Read:
The stories in this collection are careful, poignant and highly convincing portraits of well-intentioned but often hapless souls battling external and internal hurricanes. At first read, one might mistake these stories for the accurate and earnest but "tame" stories that one associates with the short story renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s: Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Bausch, etc. And these stories are indeed earnest and sincere; although they have moments of humor, they never feel glib or festive. They certainly are driven by character and not primarily by plot (One exception is the marvellous "Two Liars" in which a father burns his home for the insurance money). But Johnson's gift is that these stories are far less conventional than they appear at first glance--there is always a small but telling surprise, a slight twist that carries us into a world of imaginative genius. To put is bluntly: These stories seem important. They belong alongside the writing of a handful of contemporary short fiction authors (Elizabeth Graver, Kevin Brockmeier) who possess the ability to wade both deep into character *and* far out into the unknown. There's a reason the stories in this collection have been honored by Best New Voices, New Stories from the South, The O. Henry Prize and almost all of the tributes a published story story can obtain today.