Family Terrorists CL

By Antonya Nelson

Book Overview

Seven stories and a novella by the award-winning writer of The Expendables explore the heart of contemporary life and the ties of love, faith, anxiety, and antagonism that bind families together.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395686792
• ISBN13: 9780395686799
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Often funny and always perceptive...read it

The Written Word, one of the stories in this collection, is one of my favorite short stories ever. I'd say it's about being a young kid in a family with real if ill-defined problems, and coming up with the sort of solution only a young imaginative kid would. His reaction to some pictures his mother hid feels so right and yet is very funny. These stories have heart. Dirty Words was another story that jumped out at me; I loved the Marxist coffeehouse line. But don't worry, I won't give any of the best moments away.

Family Terrorists at large in Nelson's heartfelt stories

In "Family Terrorists," her third collection of short fiction, Antonya Nelson proves that her title, though apt, is by no means an oxymoron. The eponymous terrorists wreak mundane, unsensationalistic havoc (except in the eerily timely "The Written Word" where a little brother's prank diverts a jet and thwarts a longed-for escape.) These provocative acts include invitations to family occasions, ("Family Terrorists") giving birth, ("Dirty Words") uninvited help, ("Crybaby") or simply imparting unwanted knowledge, ("Loaded Gun"). Nelson seeds her prose with trenchant observation: "Her mother refused to understand tone, as if she were reading conversations instead of having them." "Bette's problem was that she merely missed drinking, like a hilarious friend who had moved away..." The stories unsettle by exposing the ironies inherent in our complacency. In "Naked Ladies" a painter divines his wife's infidelity from an array of ineptly rendered nudes. A woman sees how truly precarious her happiness is ("The Ocean"). A wife finally freed from her husband's obsessive ex-girlfriend misses being stalked ("Her Secret Life"). Antonya Nelson's gifts--deft characterization, gentle humor, supple language--entice us to marvel at the permutations of intimate sabotage.