**NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the
bestselling author of A Gate at the Stairs A collection of twelve
stories that's "one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human
love and vulnerability" (The New York Times Book Review).
**
A volume by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the
acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help.
Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter,
and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.
From the opening story, "Willing"--about a second-rate movie actress in
her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy
motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the
least idea of who she is as a human being--Birds of America unfolds a
startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the
unsettled of our America.
In the story "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People" ("There is
nothing as complex in the world--no flower or stone--as a single hello
from a human being"), a woman newly separated from her husband is on a
long-planned trip through Ireland with her mother. When they set out on
an expedition to kiss the Blarney Stone, the image of wisdom and success
that her mother has always put forth slips away to reveal the panicky
woman she really is.
In "Charades," a family game at Christmas is transformed into a
hilarious and insightful (and fundamentally upsetting) revelation of
crumbling family ties.
In "Community Life,"a shy, almost reclusive, librarian,
Transylvania-born and Vermont-bred, moves in with her boyfriend, the
local anarchist in a small university town, and all hell breaks loose.
And in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman who goes through
the stages of grief as she mourns the death of her cat (Anger, Denial,
Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage) is seen by her friends as really mourning
other issues: the impending death of her parents, the son she never had,
Bosnia.
