Love Stories in This Town: Stories

by Amanda Eyre Ward

Book Overview

From San Francisco to Savannah, Montana to Texas, Amanda Eyre Ward's characters are united in their fervent search to find a place where they truly belong. Annie, a librarian in a small mining town,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812980115
• ISBN13: 9780812980110
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I Echo These Other Rave Reviews!

Do you detect a pattern here? Rave five-star reviews of "Love Stories in this Town" by Amanda Eyer Ward - many which state that they rarely, if ever, love every single short story in a collection. I echo those reviews. Every single story in the collection is fabulous. Ward's humor is right up my alley, and her characters are fascinating and easy to relate to. She is a gifted short story writer, and although I'm thrilled to hear she has a new novel in the works...I also hope she never quits the short story form at which she so clearly excels.

Shades of Love

What could be better on a flight from LA to Ohio than a book of short stories? Wny a book of Amanda Eyre Ward's short stories, without a doubt! EIn ech of the stories, a female protagonist of an age to worry about child-bearing, imeets a different take on love and setting. In this anthology, the reader moves across the U.S. and to the Middle East. Some stories are directly connected with the deep losses of 9/11---and others not at all connected. But the emotion and the detail of each story sculpts a particular place and woman. The end of the book, with interlocking stories of Lola, made me wish for a Lola novel. Without a doubt, Ward has amazing talent. The ambiguity of the final line lingers, making you wonder, "What happened next to this woman?" I love that kind of reading.

Engaging, humorous, and lovely

I rarely read story collections from cover to cover, but Love Stories in This Town drew me in from the start and kept me reading page after page. These delightful and moving stories left me feeling understood.

Worth every penny and every minute

I loved this collection from start to finish, which is very unusual for me. The prose was spare and minimal, yet the smallest details seemed to illuminate the characters and their world. Ward is often fun and witty here, but what I found most engaging about this collection was how the characters haunted me afterwards. With subtlety and a soft-touch, the author gets to the heart of the matter each and every time. Even reading the story about a 9/11 widow, I never felt as if the events drove the writing. It's all about the characters here. They feel organic, real, and brimming with stories worth hearing.

A Sense of Place in a Dozen Love Stories

BOOK REVIEW: Sense of Place Explored in Amanda Eyre Ward's 'Love Stories in This Town' By David M. Kinchen Where you live can affect just about everything in your life; that's the intriguing premise explored by Amanda Eyre Ward in her collection of 12 short stories, "Love Stories in This Town" (Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Original, 224 pages, $14). The first six stories explore six different characters and how they relate to where they live; the remaining half dozen -- "Lola Stories" -- deal with Lola Wilkerson's complicated loves and her search for what she wants to do when she grows up -- and her interaction with her alcoholic father and disapproving mother-in-law. In the first section, in the story "The Way the Sky Changed," Casey, a 9/11 widow living in a New York suburb, tentatively begins dating again -- with a 9/11 widower. She lost her lawyer husband Paul in the attack on the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Her friends introduce her to Kent, who lost his software saleswoman wife Wendy who was on Flight 11. Humor and tragedy collide in this perfect-pitch penned story. In "Butte As In Beautiful," Annie, a star basketball player and class valedictorian, takes a job right out of high school in the Butte, Montana library. She wants to attend the University of Montana in Missoula as a Lady Griz, but a bad knee has kept her out of the ranks of college student-athletes: "Annie, that knee is going to give in less than a season," her coach warns her, even as the coaches for the Lady Griz persist in recruiting her. In the meantime, there's a public masturbator prowling the stacks of the library... In "The Stars Are Bright in Texas," Kimmy and her husband Greg have flown into Houston to look at houses in the planned development of The Woodlands north of the largest city in the Lone Star State. Kimmy is recovering from the stillbirth of her child and doesn't seem to be in the best condition to be househunting, especially since the house they want has been snatched from them by a higher bidder. The other three stories deal with a couple in Austin, Texas concerned about anthrax attacks; a family tragedy that forces Bill and Lizzy to examine their own lives in a Maine cabin and in pre-dot.com bust San Francisco, Mimi is employed in the marketing department of Shakespeare.com. She and her teacher husband Leo are trying to start a family in their termite-infested house in Bernal Heights. All three are wonderfully executed by a very original writer. I was going to bring up the usual suspects to compare them to Ward, but then i thought of our contemporary Dorothy Parker, Fran Lebowitz. Yes, Ward's writing has the spirit of the quintessential New Yorker Lebowitz, author of "Metropolitan Life." And then comes Lola... The six Lola stories start when college student Lola Wilkerson, from upscale suburban Rye, New York, is dumped by her boyfriend Iain, who falls in love with Miss Montana in the story "Miss Montana's Wedding Day.