A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

by Ron Carlson

Book Overview

Ron Carlson's stories, sometimes wicked or bittersweet, often zany, are rich with a hard-earned hopefulness frequently absent in contemporary fiction. In this generous gathering from collections no longer available, longtime fans and new readers alike can savor the development of a master of idiosyncrasy.

Properly celebrated for his range, Carlson offers us a rural sheriff who's wary of UFOs (Phenomena), a lawyer on a mission in remote Alaska...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393324796
• ISBN13: 9780393324792
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 466 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A good survey of short stories

This volume contains selected stories from three of writer's previous books: The News of the World, Plan B for the Middle Class, and The Hotel Eden. It would be difficult to pull out any particular story from each selection as one's favorite. They are orginal and differ from each other. Some are quite funny, and deal with frustrations of coping with the expected rules of middle class lifestyle, others reflect on life in academia, and so forth. Included in the work are marvelous descriptions of nature, beautiful rendering of settings, trenchent summaries of physical attributes of characters, taunt dialogue and no wasted words anywhere. Reading his stories is a lesson in how to write and what to emulate in the selection of details. This book can be treasured and reread many times. I recommend it to anyone.

Ron Carlson, My Hero

I've always loved endings. I'm fascinated by the way a story becomes itself, gathers force, and then, just as critical mass is reached, powers down. My favorite stories crimp like that, right as their full trajectories become visible; like being in a car that's just screeched to a halt, a good story leaves you rocking in your seat, armhairs on end from unrealized intertia. So, by mathematics alone, I'm a sucker for story collections: with a novel, you only get one ending; with a collection, you get the whole quiver. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the grand vision of the novel, and it's true that a story collection will never have the voltage of novels like Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy or Beloved by Toni Morrison. But remember: it's the amperage that kills. Pure electricity are stories like Stuart Dybek's "Paper Lantern," Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here," Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," Robert Stone's "Helping," or Charles D'Ambrosio's "The Point." You could light the sky with the story-power of Robert Olen Butler or Alice Munroe, two of our best practitioners. And with Tobias Wolff's prose, you could weld. But the writer who first influenced me, and has continued to influence me most through my career is Ron Carlson, a true writer's writer. His first three short story collections-The News of the World, Plan B for the Middle Class and Hotel Eden-have recently been published in one volume, A Kind of Flying. For a book to take up residence inside of you, so that it influences you from within, it's either got to hit you at the right time in your life or be rich enough that future readings reveal new, deeper meanings. For me, Ron Carlson's stories did both-his work became that length of rope you tie around your waist before entering a cave: no matter what adventures or perils awaited, everything would lead back through that safety line to the place you started and the sense of security that allowed you to take a risk. Carlson's stories were my permission, my proof of possibility and my way back when I got lost. I first came across Carlson's stories in the late 80s. I'd been playing hooky from life-working construction, hanging out with people who took Jimmy Buffet literally-so when I finally decided to grow up and go to college, I had to face some of the reasons it had been appealing to lead an incurious life of worktrucks and weekends in Mexico. This is when I came across Carlson's story "The Governor's Ball," about a man who voluntarily does dirty work so he can avoid the emotional work of connecting to his wife. Instead of joining her for an important function, the narrator spends the evening taking a mattress to the dump, and the whole time he drove around his fictional town, I was thinking, I know what's eating at that guy, I know what he's not talking about! Then I stumbled upon "DeRay" in GQ. Here the narrator covets the life of his neighbor DeRay, a man the narrator perceives to possess far greater abil

Reasonable Hope - the kind that we try to live by

Ron Carlson writes wonderful stories, a celebrated master of the short story form because he peoples his work with characters who dare not only to love, be hurt, feel betrayal and anger - but to stick by their hopes stubbornly (sometimes too stubbornly). The stories are tough and realistic and will tell you things about your life and the lives around you that you may not want to consider, but they are also hopeful and they remind us of the better things in our hearts, too. This is a lovely collection - buy it!

The Master at Work

Ron Carson is the hands-down Grand Master of the short story. Every single piece in this collecton is a jewel. If you love the short story form, you MUST have this book.