Another Life and Other Stories

By Edwin Weihe

Short fiction. The fictional territory of ANOTHER LIFE, this disquieting first collection of stories, is a state of emergency, and for Weihe the emergency is always the same: it is the terrifying... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1929355017
• ISBN13: 9781929355013
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Pleasure Boat Studio
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Weihe's stories are a revelation

Edwin Weihe's Another Life and Other Stories is a remarkable first collection of short fiction. Weihe's characters find themselves trapped, suffocating in their various situations, yearning, often unconsciously, to chuck it all. Sometimes, they do just that. Despite the desperation they often feel, the characters are always sympathetic, nuanced, sharply drawn. In his title piece, "Another Life," which is that unusual form, the novella, the narrator is Jack, an American academic attending a Hemingway conference in Paris. Like the famous novelist and the "Lost Generation" crowd of the `20s, the narrator is also an expat, lost from himself. It's a wonderful work in which the literary history of Paris in the '20s plays against the narrator's sense being an exile from his earlier life when a love affair in Paris ended abruptly. The writing is spare, funny, satiric in its treatment of the lit.crit./celeb scene, and finally moving in its understanding of what pushes people to the edge. When a powerhouse feminist critic pronounces the central contention of her scholarship on D.H. Lawrence, namely that Lawrence wasn't able to bring his wife Frieda to orgasm, you realize Weihe is making a wry comment about the state of literary criticism as well as the essential impotence of male critics in the face of powerful female scholars. The war between the sexes, Weihe's novella reveals, has its generals and foot soldiers in academia. I highly recommend this fine book for its honesty, understated humor, and for its unwavering gaze at the craziness of our time. When asked by an American newcomer to Paris if he believes in the afterlife, Jack replies, "This is the afterlife." Yes, it is.

Review for Another Life

In a selflessly honest appreciation for bare life, this book opens to a yearning for that which the modern human is in search of; the straining of life against its inevitable end to recapture innocence, grace before the fall, love, or what is even more mysterious, forever lost, and finally unattainable. The anxiety of these stories is deafening as you hope against hope for your own salvation along with the characters' in their quiet desperation for another life, so exigent as to be a matter of life and death; a struggle too unfathomable to dare come into consciousness, though felt every moment throughout the living flesh. You will find yourself in this book.

edgy nw, edgy france

While I know all the adages about books and covers, the black and white photo, the grainy texture, the man off center, all things that run in these stories. In a way it is France, and France is the Northwest. These stories have a terrific edginess to them. Something wonderfully unsettling keeps the reader less than comfortable and completely at the mercy of the story. After reading these stories, I felt I had woken to something I had done in my life no one must know, the dicey wonder of having gone just a little wrong, having given in to temptation. Weihe's fiction creates this dynamic tension. It is racy in all the right ways; I found it difficult not to finish in a single sitting.The stories in this collection made me want to live again. I imagined dangers lurking behind doors in Paris, in the Northwest. Finally, Weihe's perfectly chosen detail brings its own carefully chosen color to the grainy, dark, rainy quality of the Northwest and Paris. In the end, one thought: where's the next book.

Untitled

Another Life is an incisive collection of stories depicting the contemporary plight encountered in the search for love, for understanding and for a meaning to life. Delving behind the superficialities of daily living and with prophetic insight, Edwin Weihe captures the intense desires that drive his characters to their inescapable and inconclusive ends. Told in a sparse and lean style, the stories brim with a sense of urgency, an urgency that is frightening, as though tomorrow might never come.