Men at Risk: Stories

By Samuel Atlee

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 088739406X
• ISBN13: 9780887394065
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Creative Arts Book Company
• Length: 169 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Gems from an accomplished author

I've read Atlee's stories in literary magazines over the years and was very happy to to be able to get a collection of his work. This is a wonderful collection, well paced in terms of venue and point of view. The settings for the stories themselves are interesting -- China, the Philippines, and Thailand, to name a few -- as well as those that take place here at home. While most of the tales are about men and the predicaments they're in, there is a wonderful long, detailed story at the center of the book about female liberation. It's as if he put this there to show that he could deal with other themes, and he does so brilliantly. I'm a woman and a professor of English and this is one of the friedndliest, most accessible collections I've read in years. I highly recommend it!

An exceptional collection

Quite simply: this is one of the most intelligent collections of stories I have read in years. Sam Atlee is both a "writer's writer" and "reader's writer" - highly recommended.

Men at Risk, stories by Samuel Atlee

The book jacket promises stories with contemporary themes, and Atlee's volume does not disappoint. Furthermore, his collection is wise and faceted, not tiredly obsessive or fragmented. Atlee sees problems in the round, and can plot them so well that even the dilemmas of his most odious characters are felt intuitively, not gotten to boorishly. The most conventional narratives are "Artist on a Roof" and "The Inn of the Three Gorges." The most eloquent is certainly "The Field Desk." Less conventional are "An Erawan Monkey" and "Overture from a Faithful Booster," in which large, almost gothic realities loom over near-diminished characters.

Enticing. Memorable. Masterful !

Men at Risk. Samuel J. Atlee. At first, "Men at Risk" seems like a diverse collection of bright, intriguing, cosmopolitan stories peopled with memorable characters faced with not-so-ordinary conflicts. Sometimes amusing to the point where you are guffawing out loud, at others so heart-rending that your eyes brim with involuntary tears, these stories are memorable and enticing. As with all good reading you are utterly transported into other people's worlds. This is a major achievement already, but keep reading and there emerges a definitive theme to Atlee's stories that captures the frailty and longings of the human condition in new and unusual ways. Atlee sketches his characters with words as well as any accomplished artist does with a stick of charcoal. His prose is a sweeping flow that intrigues from the opening paragraphs and inexorably entices the reader to roll with the punches and pleasures of life as it really happens. He sees us "where we live", and strikes chord after chord, "is he writing about me?" you often ask yourself.You will meet them all, Pulitzer, the grimy anti-hero of "Bingo Swine & Flypaper Sisters" is the ultimate urban loser, endearing and pitiful; Webber, the loneliest man in Manila in "The girl From Blue Hawaii" is Everyman; Mrs. Merchandani, in "Krishna's Kid Ivory" is a farcical tour guide lolling through what can only be described as a "Magical Mystery Tour" set in India. And then of course there is the woman who is so distressed, that she drives her husband's jaguar into a lake!This is a brilliant debut. Atlee is masterful, and his imagination and wry sense of the absurd is reminiscent of a more erudite Kurt Vonnegut Junior. Atlee's theme explodes in every story "Life happens to Man, rather than Man controlling his own destiny."In my reading, I wished that so many of the stories were novels, and had that familiar pang of regret when I finished each one, knowing that I must give myself space before savouring a re-reading.