Breathe at Every Other Stroke: Stories

by Robert Olmstead

Book Overview

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough, laconic farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns, where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. Now he draws on his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to haunt him.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805041621
• ISBN13: 9780805041620
• Release Date: April 1996
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A great book

While I can see how some of the other reviewers feel that this book's art is too much for them, at the heart of the matter this is still a beautiful book. There is a story here that is something everyone of us has experienced or can relate too, but this story is not cliche, its not sappy, it has a warmth to it all its own. Bob does a nice job of not only telling a good story, but making it sound damn cool too.

into the depths of young man's mind, new hampshire haymow

Anyone who's ever written about their youth would have to be impressed by the perceptiveness and imagery with which Robert Olmstead weaves this tale. It captures the New Hampshire summer landscape in a thousand hues and textures, and it perches on the brink of leaving home, of irrevocable change in a family, in a way that abrades the reader's remembered growing pains. Is it possible that so many things happened in one week, played themselves out so poignantly? Maybe not. Is the girl he describes too perfect to be true? May be, (but young love captures the beloved's perfection in amber, so her portrait is true.) Is the writing style so poetic it sometimes makes me gnash my teeth with envy, and sometimes makes me want to groan, enough already, it's not the Song of Solomon? Yeah. But, man, oh, man. You got to admire the craft.

READ IT! Beautiful prose, wonderful images

I purchased this book on a whim after reading another of Olmstead's works. When I began reading, I found myself moved by the book's honesty and intimacy. Familiar & new experiences balance one another in the book - and Olmstead perfectly captures those moments when new experiences are so very new and wonderful that they are more important - almost - than breathing. I can still remember passages with crystal clarity, months later. Lovely, lovely work.

years later, great memories

i read this book when it first came out and still can't say enough nice things about it. i'm glad it's in the world when i'm in the world so i could read it. it's funny, powerful, poetic, sad, pitch-perfect. a great book forever.

from a gifted writer

This book is staying with me, well over a week since I finished. It captured me, not so much for what Olmstead shares but how he does. His writing is intimate and rich; he writes alot about how he feels as life happens. This book is much more than a detailing of events, it's like coming inside his personal journal and is mesmerizing. For me it was an experience somewhat like Mary Karr's "Liar's Club". I highly recommend this -- his writing couldn't be better and flows like water or air.