Letting Go: Stories

by Len Joy

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

FIC Joy

Collection

Publication

Independently published (2018), 85 pages

Description

A collection of short stories about ordinary people facing life, lost opportunities, regrets, and bad decisions, and trying to find a way to move on. Letting Go, 2018 Indies Finalist - War & Military From the author: It took me eight years, nine months and three days to write my first novel, American Past Time. My second novel, Better Days, was published in 2018, and my new novel, Everyone Dies Famous, will be published in 2020. When I had trouble working on those novels, I would write short fiction pieces. I am grateful to all of those folks who produce literary journals, especially the ones who published my stories. Producing a literary journal is a true labor of love. Someone asked me what the theme of my collection was. I hate those questions. I'm really bad at theme. I don't think about a theme when I'm writing the story. I'm just trying to tell a story that interests me (and hopefully someone else). I decided I could at least come up with a tagline for each story and maybe that would reveal to me a central theme of my work. Here's a few of them: Riding a Greyhound Bus into the New World - a widower searches for the innocent boy he used to be; Dalton's Good Fortune - a down-on-his-luck ex-soldier gets a new perspective on his life from a fortune teller; This Train Makes all the Stops - a man tries to adapt to a new world after his wife dies; Letting Go - a woman in an emergency room waiting for a word on her husband, reflects on her marriage. Most of these stories are about people who have lost something and are trying to find a way to move on with their lives. I hope you enjoy them. Order your copy now and let me know what you think. What readers are saying: "This short-fiction collection examines various characters' reactions to death, past regrets, and other life changes. Throughout these brief tales Joy maintains a smooth prose style with a light touch that acts as a counterpoint to the darkness.  Short edgy tales with depth." - Kirkus Reviews "You can have your Italian and Scandinavian contemporary troubadors of modern life, Len Joy knows our American one. Especially he knows men, and as woman reader, I like getting inside men's heads. No fancy stuff. No mumble jumble interiority. Len Joy is sold Americana." - Sandra Scofied - National Book Award Nominee… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member TimBazzett
I.LOVED.THIS.BOOK. LETTING GO you say? Wasn't that a Philip Roth novel? Well yeah, but that was Philip Roth. This is Len Joy. And as much as I have loved Roth for the past fifty-plus years, this Joy guy could give Roth some serious competition (and minus the misogyny so much talked about in the
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latest Roth bio). But perhaps the most important function this minuscule collection of mostly very short stories fills is the way it amplifies Joy's much-praised (and deservedly so) first novel, AMERICAN PAST TIME. (And I LOVED that onetoo.) Because a couple of the longer pieces here - "Time Don't Run Out on Me" and the title story - give us mini-portraits of characters and places that showed up on the larger canvas of the novel. There's the forty-ish mail-carrier/EMT, Tina Bennett (a fifteen year-old 'Trudy' Bennett in APT), who meets an older, wiser Clayton Stonemason at Jake's Place, the blue-collar bar that looms large in APT, as do Clayton and his father, the emotionally and physically scarred ex-pitcher, Dancer Stonemason. And Dancer too shows up here in the person of 'Doak,' who "rescues" Tina's much younger friend, Annie, from her abusive ex-husband, in the parking lot of Jake's.

But hey, despite the brevity of these stories, you get the same ultra real dialogue and fully realized characters you get in the novel. I mean, in the space of just a few paragraphs, you come to care for these people. That's how good a writer Len Joy is. Not Philip Roth. Nope. Pure Joy. And every story here is a small, polished gem. I loved this little book. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
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