The Weight of a Human Heart
Stories
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"You will be astounded by the hugeness of his heart, and by the breadth and depth of his vision. O'Neill is a writer of limitless imagination." —Hector Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries
Ranging from Australia and Africa to Europe and Asia and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart heralds a fresh and important new voice in fiction. Ryan O'Neill takes us on a journey that is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and wholly original.
A young Tutsi girl flees her village on the brink of the Rwandan genocide. A literary duel—and an affair—play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter.
With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vital storytelling and literary flourishes distinguish Scottish author O'Neill's creative story collection. Throughout, the author employs original devices, from the elucidating subscript notations of "The Footnote," to the doodles and flowcharts tracking a relationship's disintegration in "Figures in a Marriage," to the fonts and broken typewriter keys of "Typography," a powerful story that evokes the crushing effects of loss on youth. "The Cockroach," one of the best, appears early and eschews bells and whistles as it follows a girl in Rwanda. That country is the setting for other stories as well, including "The Genocide," in which injustice competes with beauty. But lightness and satire saturate the brilliant "A Short Story"; and amidst stories supported by Venn diagrams, exam questions, distinguished author quotations ("Seventeen Rules for Writing a Short Story"), and a tale told through book reviews ("The Eunuch in the Harem"), there's also sex, clever narration, and illustrative graphics that add wit and whimsy. What brings all of the tonal diversity together is Neill's obvious understanding of the cohesiveness of language, its power to transcend and overcome, and the way an economy of precious words in a short story can achieve a novel's worth of emotion.
