Lee K. Abbott

All Things, All At Once

The long-awaited new collection from Lee K. Abbott, "Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer" (William Harrison).

Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliations—common heartbreak, fractured families—and records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.

"From the very start, we're engaged by the entertainment and vitality of Abbott's prose, by its local color. Then, right in the middle of a typically eccentric and loose-limbed story, he often grabs us with a moment that becomes sharply moving."—New York Times Book Review

"Like stepping into a rushing stream. Before you know it, you've been thrown up on the bank in a place you never anticipated."—Dallas Morning News

"Abbott's stories are the stuff of everyday life wrought crisply and with clarity as visual as it is visceral....Each piece resonates its own complex chords of loss, suffering, betrayal, redemption."—Baltimore Sun

"This is Abbott at his best...a master at work."—Booklist