Mr. Agreeable

By Kirk Nesset

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595390219
• ISBN13: 9781595390219
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Mammoth Books
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

very very impressed

Kirk Nesset's latest collection of short stories wows often, delights most of the time, and impresses upon the reader the notion of paying attention/tribute to, as one story puts it, "the useless colussus of what we know and believe and are." [i think i got that right--it might be "sic" cause my kid's gone and stolen the book from me! he fell in love with the first riff, "Believing in People," and poached my copy and took it back to San Francisco.] Pessimistic, wot? Oxymoronic, wot? Yeah sure, but these are almost all of them diamond-bright and fastidiously composed/thought-thru letters from the frontiers of the quotidian: i LOVE that the dialog uses what you might call taglines for the characters--in a really really terse, pithy way each character gets a few lines--lines that sum him or her up...kinda. Nesset has this great poetic tic as well: he repeats words in a sentence. You'll see; it's like lathering something sweet and substantial on top of something nice and tasty. You might find that the prose is TOO manicured sometimes, too self-conscious. But that's better than the mania for loose language that pervades a lot of modern writing. And this is LITTLE MAGAZINE writing...at its best. Nesset is a minor writer. But so was John Clare, Chatterton and the amazing Christopher Smart. "Believing in People" and "Hot Water" are simply great "minor writer" stories, however. Hip and not TOO hip. The artwork is diabolical. Fire that art director. Don't let the unmitigated amateurishness of the cover art deter you from picking up this decidedly NOT AMATEURISH batch of very very impressive stories.