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Bloom, Amy: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 033037690X (0-330-37690-X)
Softcover, Pan Macmillan

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Book summary:

It was Henry James who first claimed the imagination of disaster, but in Amy Bloom's stunning second collection, she appears to have inherited the mantle. Most of the characters in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You are pursued by at least one of the biological furies: cancer, miscarriage, Parkinson's disease. And even those with their health intact tend to be sick at heart, having run the gantlet of family life and suffered what the military men like to call friendly fire. Yet the effect of these brilliant stories is anything but dreary. Instead they produce an odd sense of elation--Bloom somehow persuades us that her characters will continue under their own steam long after we've closed the book, and she alternates hope and hopelessness in exactly the right, recognizable proportions.

Take the title story, in which a middle-aged mother is determined to see her daughter through the rigors of a sex-change operation. Jane puts up a good front, almost but not quite earning the title of Transsexual Mom of the Year, and supports her "handsome boy-girl" every step of the way. Yet the strain shows. And when she meets a supernaturally nice man, she can't quite credit her good fortune--even his appearance at her door with an armload of flowers touches off a fresh round of ambivalence:

And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off into a cockeyed and irresistible future.

The inclusion of Some Like It Hot's Joe E. Brown, who's gotten both more and less than he bargained for in his cross-dressing sweetheart, is a typically marvelous touch. And lest we think that Bloom has weighted the scales too heavily in favor of disillusion, Jane's new lover gets in the last word, citing the South Carolina state motto: "Dum spiro, spero.... While I breathe, I hope." Just keep breathing, the reader wants to say.

"Stars at Elbow and Foot" and "Rowing to Eden" are no less effective in their mingling of tragedy and sublime trivia. In two other stories, Bloom revives the Sampson clan, which she first introduced in Come to Me, and beautifully extends her mini-epic of mixed-race life without a grain of namby-pamby PC hesitation. And last but not least, there's "The Story," a tricky number in which Bloom seems to shoot to hell her own reputation for Chekhovian decency. Here we have a narrator who lies and dissembles, destroys her rival, and lives to tell the (metafictional) tale: "Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator's affection." In the end, though, Bloom is simply too gifted a writer to banish all seven types of ambiguity from her work. She understands that we are hopelessly divided creatures and cuts us the necessary, unsentimental slack. Or to put it another way, she forgives all--but forgets nothing. --James Marcus [via]

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Come to Me

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 0060995149 (0-06-099514-9)
Softcover, Perennial

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Book summary:

Amy Bloom's 1993 collection, Come to Me, is filled with yearning mysteries of romantic and familial love that are far more complex than the phrase "love story" allows. The first sentence of the first story, "Love Is Not a Pie," evinces the contradictions, layers, and interconnections of her narrator's existence--and hooks the reader entirely. "In the middle of the eulogy at my mother's boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding." The title phrase means exactly what it says: Lila's mother didn't have a finite amount of affection and was lucky not to be forced to choose between love's accepted forms and a more unusual one: "People think that it can't be that way, but it can. You just have to find the right people." Lila realizes that she needs to get out of her engagement because she isn't ready for normality.

The unusual pervades these stories, and Bloom handles some outsized events with delicacy and humor. In "Sleepwalking," a new widow sends her stepson away after they've slept together, because she wants him to have a normal life. The author makes us aware that there's something terrible and foolhardy about this woman's decision. Several other characters find themselves in equally desperate situations, their only consolation being recollections of earlier bliss, often sensual: "It was like nothing else in my life, that river of love that I could dip into and leave and return to once more and find it still flowing." For them, memories of past happiness makes present sorrow bearable. [via]

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Here Lies My Heart: Essays on Why We Marry, Why We Don'T, and What We Find There

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 0807062170 (0-8070-6217-0)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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More editions of Here Lies My Heart: Essays on Why We Marry, Why We Don'T, and What We Find There:

Here Lies My Heart: Essays on Why We Marry, Why We Don'T, and What We Find There: ISBN 0807062170 (0-8070-6217-0)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

Love Invents Us

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 0330350692 (0-330-35069-2)
Softcover, Pan Macmillan

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In this first novel, Amy Bloom spins the tale of one Elizabeth Taube, charting her progress from an unloved adolescent to (alas) an unloved, middle-aged mother. To be sure, Elizabeth has had no shortage of suitors. Yet, one by one, they desert her, leaving nothing but their imprints upon her personality--which, if we are to take the title literally, is almost all the personality we have. The author steers clear of sentimentalizing her heroine's plight. And Bloom's eerie ability to convey physical sensation--which also distinguished her story collection Come to Me--is on ample and impressive display. [via]

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Normal : Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 0747564566 (0-7475-6456-6)
Softcover, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Amy Bloom has won a devoted readership and wide critical acclaim for fiction of rare humor, insight, grace, and eloquence, and the same qualities distinguish Normal, her first full-length work of nonfiction. In Normal, the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award finalist explores sex and gender through portraits of people who are widely considered not normal.

A great many people, sick of news from the margins, worn out by the sand shifting beneath their assumptions, like to imagine Nature as a sweet, simple voice: tulips in spring, Vermonts leaves falling in autumn, Bloom writes. Nature is more like Aretha Franklin: vast, magnificent, capricious, occasionally hilarious, and infinitely varied.

Bloom takes us on a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromaticfemale-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transgender transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband, Melanie, who devote themselves to the cause of ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension. And we meet Hale Hawbecker, a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender.

Bloom shows the essential humanity in this infinite variety, allowing us to appreciate these people as they really areboth like and unlike everyone elseand inviting us to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share. Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, about what it means to be male or female, Bloom reveals new facets to ideas about happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illumines the very concept of normal. [via]

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Persuasion

by Amy Bloom

ISBN 0375757295 (0-375-75729-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Anne Elliot, heroine of Austen's last novel, did something we can all relate to: Long ago, she let the love of her life get away. In this case, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by a trusted family friend that the young man she loved wasn't an adequate match, social stationwise, and that Anne could do better. The novel opens some seven years after Anne sent her beau packing, and she's still alone. But then the guy she never stopped loving comes back from the sea. As always, Austen's storytelling is so confident, you can't help but allow yourself to be taken on the enjoyable journey. [via]

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Persuasion: ISBN 0375757295 (0-375-75729-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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The Wings of the Dove

by Henry James, Amy Bloom

ISBN 0812967194 (0-8129-6719-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Set amid the splendor of London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The Wings of the Dove is the story of Milly Theale, a na�ve, doomed American heiress, and a pair of lovers, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who conspire to obtain her fortune. In this witty tragedy of treachery, self-deception, and betrayal, Henry James weaves together three ill-fated and wholly human destinies unexpectedly linked by desire, greed, and salvation. As Amy Bloom writes in her Introduction, The Wings of the Dove is a novel of intimacy. . . . [James] gives us passion, he gives us love in its terrible and enchanting forms. [via]

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Amy Bloom

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Amy Bloom

new books, used books, rare books by Amy Bloom

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.

Coauthors & Alternates

Learn More at LibraryThing

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site:

Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.