Good As Any: Stories

By Timothy A. Westmoreland

From a new voice in American fiction come tales of men whose language is grief, whose off-center lives expose the difficulty of being whole in a world they cannot understand. Set in the spare,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151008523
• ISBN13: 9780151008520
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Powerful New Voice in Fiction

A powerful new voice in fiction, Timothy Westmoreland has that rare ability to make even the most mundane aspects of his characters' lives seem transcendent. And he does not shy away from the bleak realities his characters' lives in any of these eight stories. Instead, he carries you headlong into the depths of their loneliness, illness, and loss. If you have the courage and willingness to go with him, to struggle along with his characters in their search for connection and meaning in an unfriendly world, then Westmoreland will not only delight you with his beautifully turned phrases and spare, elegant dialogue, but he will leave you stronger and wiser from the experience. I look forward to more work from this promising new writer.

powerful stories

Few books I've read in the last couple of years pack as staggering a wallop as this collection of stories. With prose both eloquent and spare and dialogue that rings utterly true, Timothy Westmoreland's stories call up characters struggling to reach beyond physical and spiritual limitations. These stories, beautiful despite (and because) of their dark, unadorned vision of life, shimmer with poignancy and clarity.

Rich and strange

There's a lot of darkness in these stories, but there's strange beauty, too: the weird call of a bluetick hound in snowy woods, the deadly autumn colors of a forest fire on a distant hill, the grieving man who tears out his ceiling to build a planetarium in his kitchen, his own private view of the stars. Westmoreland is as precise and deft as a surgeon, and as daring. He takes his scalpel right to the heart of things, where the trouble is, and like a surgeon he'll take any necessary risk. There are other young writers with Westmoreland's kind of skill and craft, but none with his courage. He uses his talent to get right to the hard truths that other people use their talent to avoid. He is the rarest of writers, a storyteller free of denial. There's nothing Westmoreland fears but dishonesty. If you're looking for a book where frogs are princes and no one ever dies, this isn't it. But somehow I found these stories consoled me. These are stories about living with the darkness, and never giving in. There's no running away, but hope is always turning up in the unlikeliest places.

"Good As Any" Better Than Many

In this debut collection of short fiction, Westmoreland explores aloneness as it pervades the everyday, normal pursuits of his protagonists, if one can call them that. These stories can be read on several levels but always require the reader to think rather than simply turn pages. It would be easy to compare Westmoreland's style to that of Raymond Carver, but stop!--this voice is highly individual and not a knock-off of any other author I've read. The vocabulary is sweeping, yet accessible. The stories reveal deepening levels of pain, both emotional and physical, as the reader peels back each layer. Some tell tales of personal tragedy; all have points of well-done dry humor. My favorite happens to be the story from which the collection takes its title: "Good As Any"--because of the surface subject matter of the story itself. But I was impressed by all the stories in this debut effort, especially "The Buried Boy." These are not "happy slappy" stories by any stretch, but they are all well worth spending quality time with and getting to know. I eagerly await more from this important new author.