{"product_id":"funny-once-stories-9781620408612","title":"Funny Once: Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003eMichael 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646993850421,"sku":"ByrdShop_1620408619","price":20.96,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781620408612.jpg?v=1781684706","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/funny-once-stories-9781620408612","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}