Amy Hempel

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American short story writer
Born: December 14th, 1951

gets the
"Author-I-am-currently-on-my-knees-prostrating-myself-in-front-of " award.

known for
Short stories. And shorter short stories. After publishing a collection or two of short stories she was asked if she would now head into longer form fiction (i.e. a novel) to which she replied that she was instead "looking forward to writing shorter work". Thus far, she has held true to this statement. She refers to her one novella, "Tumble Home" (which, for other authors would constitute a short story—dialing in at 83 pages, in a big font) as merely "the long thing."

Hempel is one of the funniest, grittiest writers I know of. Her style is incomparable, and her stories are enmeshed in the details of every day life. As novelist William Kennedy so aptly stated, she has an incredible ability to "leave out all the right things." She takes what's going on in the world, distills it down to its most basic, fundamental details and hands back a tight, precise, gem of a story which, in the span of a handful of pages, sums up entire lives. She is the best at what she does: read her work and be forever changed.

the best news i've heard all year
Her Collected Stories are coming out in May. You people should be jumping out of your seats at this prospect.

people (besides me) who are obsessed with her
Chuck Palahniuk: "Every year on the itemized Schedule C of my tax return, I deduct more money for new copies of Hempel's books…Each story is so tight, so boiled to bare facts, that all you can do is lie on the floor, face down, and praise it."
And, "In airports and on trains, the toughest part of reading The Dog of the Marriage is how much your jaw muscles ache from the effort it takes to not laugh and cry in front of strangers. Amy Hempel is my god among writers."

Howard Nemerov: "Despite the great delight I have in the mosaic character of her constructions - a hundred minute particulars obliquely placed, bits and pieces forming up into a coherence - I find Amy Hempel's stories most moving in the terse elegance of their composition and the elegiac sorrows of their substance."

Jim Shepard: "Amy Hempel is one of our masters of offhandedly rendered dire emotional states. Her fiction is breath-catchingly tender and funny. With The Dog of the Marriage she turns her stunningly dispassionate and compassionate eye to erotic love and longing, to characters who let passion prevail. The stories that result are both spectacularly intimate and beautifully built, and bring us back to the question that powers all her work: Can we take each other in?"

Honor Moore: "Amy Hempel writes with a poet's immediacy and a lover's grace. It's wonderful, this book, how it reads like a letter back from a dream - everything we know tumbled and reimagined to make fragile, illogical, beautiful sense. "

Richard Howard: "This novella, sustained by half a dozen short pieces rich with her inimitable resonance - heartbreaking, hilarious, slightly uncanny - is the extended narrative we have craved from Amy Hempel. How original in its structure, how consistent in its tone, and how gratifying in its severity of line! We follow the threat of her story, as she would say, recognizing this latest embodiment of that High Modern Figure being shaped by writers from Colette to Didion, from Rhys to Stafford, only here without attitude, without altitude, so to speak; it is from such vulnerabilities that Aphrodite's invincible arms are made."

Alice Munro: "Tumble Home is the kind of book you can open anywhere and the prose wins your absolute trust. There's not a soggy patch or word. It's wonderful. I love it."

some other things this author has written
Reasons to Live
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Tumble Home
The Dog of Marriage