Funny Once: Stories

About this book

Michael Chabon once said "I scan the tables of contents of magazines looking for Antonya Nelsons name hoping that she has decided to bless us again." And now she has blessed us again with a bounty of the stories for which she is so beloved. Her stories are clear-eyed hard-edged beautifully formed. In the title story "Funny Once " a couple held together by bad behavior fall into a lie with their more responsible friends. In "The Village " a woman visits her father at a nursing home recalling his equanimity at her teenage misdeeds and gaining a new understanding of his own past indiscretions. In another when a troubled girl in the neighborhood goes missing a mother worries increasingly about her teenage sons relationship with a bad-news girlfriend. In the novella "Three Wishes " siblings muddle through in the aftermath of their elder brothers too-early departure from the world. The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas Texas New Mexico and Colorado. Throughout there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget to have sex with the wrong people to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging regretting actions both taken and not inhabiting their extended adolescences as best they can. And in Funny Once their flawed humanity is made beautiful perfectly observed by one of Americas best short story writers.