All Over

By Roy Kesey

"A restlessly inventive collection, as the best story collections so often are--comic and tender, ironic and earnest, deadpan and passionate. A distinctive new voice, from a distinctive new press."--Peter Ho Davies, author of "The Welsh Girl"Includes "Wait," a "Best American Short Stories 2007 "inclusion.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979312302
• ISBN13: 9780979312304
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Length: 145 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.8" x 8.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up

Customer Reviews

A brilliant & deeply satisfying short-story debut

Uproarious yet unsettling, Roy Kesey's first collection of stories combines a joshing respect for the forms he appropriates -- he has fictions based on everything from the job interview ("Interview") to the international crime thriller ("Follow the Money") -- w/ a phrase-coining shamelessness. Again & again ALL OVER shoots booming through the cliché barrier into the electrifying pleasures of language off the chain. He works in Americana, deadheaded & mall-worthy, & also in high rhetorical tones, almost Elizabethan here, high-Modernist there. Yet for all that the style's worth savoring, there's plenty more to gape at, amid these flash-fictions, stories of ordinary length, & novellas. That longer work includes a Best American winner, the transcendent "Wait," an epic set at an airport gate. "Wait" develops into a showpiece drama, w/ admirable complications, seductive & ingenious. It's a picaresque that goes nowhere, an apocalypse full of hilarity (though a scene about burnt toes can fetch tears), & a transgressive romance, bashing across borders of race and more, in which its climactic marriage is also, in its way, one of convenience. Whew. Then there's "Fontanel," another gem of some heft, working through an old-fashioned Godlike narrator in a new-fangled arrangement that makes its events all the more hair-raising. I have a few misgivings, sure, a case or two in which a bizarre framework & imaginative leaps overwhelm humbler connections. Sill if weary catchalls like "postmodern" or "experimental" have any cachet left, you'll catch its intoxicating whiff in ALL OVER. You can't help thinking, even, of Donald Barthelme, that po-mo touchstone. Kesey, overall, comes as close to Don B. as anyone has during the last couple of decades, though God knows the mad scientists of our literature have never ceased their efforts to cook up a replicant. But to suggest that the accomplishment of ALL OVER depends on any one earlier author would be to diminish what Roy Kesey himself has done: hilarious, startling, & -- actually -- gorgeous.

The Short Review's review of All Over

Reading Roy Kesey's collection made me happy. Re-reading it soon after made me even happier. This is not because Kesey's stories are hopeful or optimistic. It is because this is a writer so clearly in love with language and rhythm that it is a delight to experience what he does with words - both those we are familiar with and those I suspect he invented. The 19 stories range in length from one to ten pages. Several were previously published in literary magazines such as McSweeney's and Opium, publications with a reputation for clever, sharp, irreverent writing. While Kesey's work does fit this description, this is not cleverness for the sake of it. In almost all the stories, even those that on the surface appear utterly absurd, he is unearthing the complexities of our world, the messes we make of it, and the small moments of joy. [...]

Sweet, sad, wonderful

Loved this book. Kesey has an easy and enlightening way of telling his stories - I hope he writes another collection quickly.

Roy Kesey is a star, and these stories are why

The first thing you'll notice about the stories in All Over is that they move lightning fast, that their trajectory is fueled by funny, that their funny is not separable from the sadness from where the funny comes, that the sadness is not wry or perfunctory, but rather as true as the true things we'd rather not know our lives are limned by. The second thing you'll notice is that you're done reading, and you're done laughing, but the stories aren't done with you. They'll be eating at you for awhile, because of that sad thing, and because of that true thing. The third thing you'll notice is that you've picked up the book again, and you've forgotten, while those stories were eating at you, that amidst all that sad and all that true, those stories were really pretty funny, and you'll read the funny with pleasure, forgetting what's going to hit you next, which is the whiplash of the sad and the true. You'll get knocked around this way a few times, and you'll read the book again, even after you think you're done with it. Who else does this to you? Donald Barthelme, sure, and also Brock Clarke and George Saunders and Kurt Vonnegut. Heady company, yes, but Kesey earns it out, story by story. I'm glad I bought this book, and if you're on my Christmas list, I might buy you a copy, too, but why wait, and deprive yourself of these complicated pleasures? This is a book to buy now, and to read, and to savor.

Publisher comments

As the publisher of Roy Kesey's remarkable collection, I am proud to share with you some comments from other author/readers about Roy's 'All Over:' "These stories by Roy Kesey, in the way they brilliantly blend humor and pathos, remind me of coins tossed in the air, turning over and over, one side cast in light, the other in darkness. His writing is original, fearless, strikingly funny, and clean - so clean - his words sharp enough to cut the eye." - Benjamin Percy, author of The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh "All Over is the strangest, best collection of stories you will read this year. With a seamless blend of lyricism and minimalism, Roy Kesey travels All Over the terrain of he psyche, the human condition, the relationships we have and fail to have. These stories team with insights, little horrors, moments of sweet verity, and surreal surprise. The characters are persuasive, and the storytelling is both hallucinatory and familiar. This is a new voice you must hear." -Laura Kasischke, author of Be Mine, and five other titles "Roy Kesey tempers his prodigious imagination with fine syntactic control, so that his stories - like Donald Barthelme's - feel simultaneously free-wheeling and precise. All Over is an exhilarating collection - funny, harrowing, smart, odd, and inventive." -Chris Bachelder, author of U.S! and Bear vs. Shark "Reading Roy Kesey is like being allowed to peep momentarily through a mysterious hole in the wall into a hidden universe that is very much like ours only slightly brighter, slightly sadder, certainly no less odd. Violinists play in the rain to keep swallows in flight. Strange, leaking packages tied up with string wait to be opened. In other words, Roy Kesey is a delight to read." -Samantha Hunt, author of The Seas "A restlessly inventive collection, as the best story collections so often are - comic and tender, ironic and earnest, deadpan and passionate. A distinctive new voice, from a distinctive new press." -Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl "For those keen to know the next generation of the American short story, consider All Over, which features the loopy paranoia of Don DeLillo, the po-mo-mo whimsy of Donald Barthelme, the spooky learnedness of Thomas Pynchon, the high-minded literary sleight-of-hand of Robert Coover and John Barth, and the secret geek speak of George Saunders. Add a touch of the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne, and the Looney Tunes, and you've got a book of a million moving parts, all of which work in breath-taking harmony to keep illusion aloft." -Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: Collected Stories, and five other collections "Roy Kesey's excellent All Over is all over intelligent, intense, often very funny and frequently, frankly, beautiful. Stories in this collection will imminently appear in slightly different form in the deepest, darkest corners of your mind where they will burn, very, very brightly, for hours." -Laird Hunt, author of The Paris Stories,