Staff Pick
Homes is a master of the short story collection, and she has a keen eye for everyday minutia, which she is somehow able to mine for meaning. With an eye to domestic drama, Homes serves up one stellar story after another, but don't stop at her short story collections — her novels are sublime! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The breakthrough story collection that established A. M. Homes as one of the most daring writers of her generation Originally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are "Adults Alone," in which a couple drops their kids off at Grandma's and gives themselves over to ten days of Nintendo, porn videos, and crack; "A Real Doll," in which a girl's blond Barbie doll seduces her teenaged brother; and "Looking for Johnny," in which a kidnapped boy, having failed to meet his abductor's expectations, is returned home. These stories, by turns satirical, perverse, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life even as their characters stay hidden behind the disguises they have so carefully created.
Review
"A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk."
-Zadie Smith
"Fierce and eloquent."
-The New York Times Book Review
"As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious."
-USA Today
"I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end."
-Amy Tan
"As a memoirist, A. M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to tell."
-Chicago Tribune
Review
Homes dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . . Laugh-outloud funny. (
The Boston Globe)
An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
I think this brave story of a lost mans reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebodys life. (Stephen King)
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Review
Praise for
The Safety of Objects:
“Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . . original and stiletto sharp.” —The Washington Post
“Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.” —Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times
“Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes’s predecessors are—Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all come to mind—but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever.” —The Village Voice
“A.M. Homes’ provocative and funny and sometimes very sad takes on contemporary suburban life impressed me enormously. The more bizarre things get, the more impressed one is by A.M. Homes’ skills as a realist, a portraitist of contemporary life at its more perverse.” —David Leavitt
“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well-written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition . . . Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.” —Ruth Rendell
“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives. A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.” —Meg Wolitzer
“Set in a world filled with edges to topple from, [The Safety of Objects] is permeated by the bizarre. . . . The unexpected emerges from the story itself, startling and unexpectedly right.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Synopsis
The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own.
The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes relates how they initially made contact and what happened afterwards, and digs through the family history of both sets of her parents in a twenty-first-century electronic search for self. Daring, heartbreaking, and startlingly funny, Homes's memoir is a brave and profoundly moving consideration of identity and family.
Synopsis
Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.
This Book Will Save Your Life is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.
About the Author
A. M. Homes is the author of the memoir
The Mistress's Daughter and the novels
This Book Will Save Your Life,
Music for Torching,
The End of Alice,
In a Country of Mothers, and
Jack. She has published fiction and essays in the
New Yorker,
Granta,
Harper's Magazine,
McSweeney's,
One Story, the
New York Times, and
Vanity Fair, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in New York City.