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    Hall of Small Mammals: Stories
    Unavailable
    Hall of Small Mammals: Stories
    Unavailable
    Hall of Small Mammals: Stories
    Audiobook8 hours

    Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

    Written by Thomas Pierce

    Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller.

    The stories in Thomas Pierce's Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world.

    In "Shirley Temple Three," a mother must shoulder her son's burden-a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In "The Real Alan Gass," a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the "daisy" spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass.  Like the daisy particle itself-"forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two"-the stories in Thomas Pierce's Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected.

    From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce's voice emerges-a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 8, 2015
    ISBN9780698191181
    Unavailable
    Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

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    Reviews for Hall of Small Mammals

    3.5/5

    22 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is a collection of short stories, all of the genre that thinks it isn't a genre, literary fiction. Pierce is a good writer, and the stories are well-written. Many of the characters are even engaging; the reader cares about them and wants to know what happens.

      But this is literary fiction, so stories don't start in medias res and some to some sort--any sort--of a conclusion. They amble along through events and problems that are sometimes interesting, and then they end in medias res. Or rather, they stop; they do not end. We'll never know what was interesting about the Pippin monkeys, or whether the father/son relationship was at all strengthened by the camping trip, or what were the impliedly huge consequences of the sideshow operator getting the fossil creature rather than the museum. We'll certainly never know what the disease was that killed Bert's brother Rob, or where it came from.

      I believe this is supposed to be Deep and Significant, or at least terribly sophisticated. The world is pointless, life is pointless, Story is an artificial construct...

      Yes. Yes, it is. So is written language, and paper, and the internet.

      In the end, I am left frustrated and annoyed.

      Not recommended.

      I received a free electronic galley of this book from Penguin's First to Read program.
    • 2/5
      It's hard to write a good short story - much less a good short story collection. In some short stories, nothing happens, and yet it's still interesting to read. In these short stories, nothing happens, and it's quite dull. Neat ideas, but the most intriguing parts of these stories were compressed instead of fleshed out. It's like the author dipped a toe in the realm of the weird but immediately withdrew it. Each story has just a tinge of the strange and fantastical, but it's been so stripped down that you barely have anything to chew on.
    • 5/5
      “Hall of Small Mammals” would be worth reading just for the opening story alone, “Shirley Temple Three”. But fortunately, there’s plenty more. The stories in this amazing collection ranged from good to excellent. Some of them were weird, some funny, some surrealist… but all of them were smart, original and beautifully written. But even in those quirky stories about a cloned dwarf mammoth or a mysterious extremely infectious disease, the author was in fact telling us about real people, about human feelings, relationships and emotions.A collection of stories and characters that linger in your mind days after finishing the book. As I said before, I liked all of them, but I’d like to highlight “Grasshopper Kings”, “More Soon”, “We of the Present Age” and “Shirley Temple Three”. I find hard to believe that this solid collection is Mr. Pierce’s debut, and I’m looking forward to read his second book.