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May We Shed These Human Bodies, by Amber Sparks
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May We Shed These Human Bodies peers through vast spaces and skies with the world's most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds. Here is humanity building: families reconstruct themselves, mothers fashion babies from two-by-fours and nails, boys make a mother out of leaves and twigs and wishes. Here is humanity tearing down: a wife sets her house on fire in revenge, a young girl plots to kill the ghosts that stalk her, a dying man takes the whole human race with him. Here is humanity transforming: feral children, cannibalistic seniors, animal wives—a whole sideshow's worth of oddballs and freaks.
- Sales Rank: #263954 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Curbside Splendor Publishing
- Published on: 2012-10-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .36" w x 5.00" l, .39 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 150 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Sparks’s debut story collection swirls with a Tim Burton-like whimsy…modern fables in which epiphanies replace moral lessons and tales unfold with Grimm-like wickedness.
— Publishers Weekly
"Best Small Press Debut of 2012."
— The Atlantic
"Sometimes all it takes is a few sentences to knock you off your rocker. Or at least that’s the case in Sparks’s debut collection, which packs 30 short short stories, each its own modern fable, into one handsome book.
— Flavorwire
"There was Aesop, Thomas Bulfinch, Edith Hamilton, Angela Carter—and now there is Amber Sparks with a new take on the fable. May We Shed These Human Bodies is a clever, scary, and charming debut collection full of great imagination."
— Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray and Dear Everybody
About the Author
Amber Sparks is the author of May We Shed These Human Bodies, released by Curbside Splendor in 2012. Her work has been widely published in print and online and you can find some of it at ambernoellesparks.com or follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Magical stories that reveal the truth in us all.
By Richard Thomas
THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
As its title suggests, May We Shed These Human Bodies (Curbside Splendor) by Amber Sparks is a collection of stories that is grounded in reality, but often has a hint of the surreal, the supernatural, woven into its fabric. The power in these stories comes from the awareness that a life is at a tipping point, and the assignment of emotional weight to everyday events we typically ignore. Just out of sight, behind the curtain, in the shadows, strange things are happening--dark moments that echo our secrets and lies.
Many of the stories utilize lists and numbers to condense great yawning chasms of time, place, and horror into compact observations that leave us dented and eager for repair. Take this passage from "The Chemistry of Objects," which elevates a common canister to sinister and far-reaching proportions:
"Exhibit 5WW: Metal Canister. Discovered at Majdanek, 1944.
The casual observer may, at first glance, mistake the canister behind the glass for a dented coffee can. The label is almost entirely gone, the faded gold paper clinging in shreds to the flaking, rusted metal. But if the visitor looks closely at the largest shred they may make out a group of small black letters, gone indigo with age and sun. Giftgas! the letters shout. How funny it sounds, like a children's party favor. How exciting! A handful of bright plastic packets. Laughing gas tied off with curled satin ribbons.
But the letters do not shout in English, and the contents of the canister were never meant to be merry. The word is German. The English translation: poison gas. This can is not a coffee can, and it has never contained beans or laughing gas or party favors; it has instead poured pellets of gas into sealed chambers through special vents, smothering those inside. Polish Jews who'd never seen the sea, drowned in their own blood."
What Amber Sparks does so well here is conjure up a memory of genocide by merely staring at a canister in a display case. To one person the meaning and graphics are merely an amusement, a bit of history, one moment in a sea of other moments. But to many others this object is horrific, emblematic of a greater evil in the world, one that cut a wide swath of destruction. And this is how she pulls us in and tears us apart--by using history, mythology, magic and the unknown to tell us her fables and dark truths.
In one of my favorite stories in the collection, "The World After This One," Sparks tells us the story of two very different sisters. Esther is the reliable one, the conservative and worrisome sister, while Ellie is the wandering beauty, lost in her thoughts, lost in the world, connecting in whatever ways she can. This touching story about family is accurate in its depiction of how siblings relate. One day you're defending your sister, saving her from the wretched grip of a dark and violent world, and the next day you're dispensing judgment yourself--questioning her actions, yelling at her for being irresponsible and aloof. Take this moment from early in the story:
"Once, when Esther was in college, she told her father she was going on a Youth Ministry camping trip. Instead she drove the three hours to the city, picked up Ellie and took her to the shore for a week.
Ellie grew obsessed with the slot machines. On the beach, she gave her room number to several strange men. Esther had to keep answering the door in the middle of the night and explaining to seedy men with goatees that her sister wasn't well.
Why would you want to sleep with all those people? Esther had asked her sister, exasperated and sad. Ellie had smiled. In just two days of sun her hair had gone nearly white and a big chunk of it fell over her eye, making her look like a sunburned Veronica Lake.
I'm allowing them to become gods, she had explained helpfully. Esther has not taken her anywhere since."
There is a gentle and gracious wisdom in the words of Ellie, even if she is naïve and a victim in the making. It's unclear which is worse--taking these chances that are sure to lead to trouble, or separating yourself from the world so that you can never get hurt?
There are insights in these stories, moments where Sparks sheds light on a wide range of emotional truths, leaving us nodding our heads, searching for breath, trying to quiet our beating hearts. In "You Will Be the Living Equation" we touch on the subject of loss and pain and the kinds of people that approach us in our grief. The first kind sympathizes and offers up their own memories of grief. This is the second:
"The second kind will sit with you in silence. They will have nothing to say, because they will understand that pain is not something that can be shared or solved, that pain is not a checklist or a questionnaire. They will understand that pain is not only loss, is not only sad, is not only one thing and not sometimes another thing altogether. That pain is not quantitative, but that it can be marked off with chalk lines on a cell wall just the same. That pain is not a landscape, and yet we carefully map its roads, its quick peaks, its long dips and even the smudges on the page that obscure intention or effect. That pain is not psychic, but that it does sometimes offer a moment of brief, bright clarity."
And isn't that so true? This is such a concise and brilliant observation. And whether Sparks it talking about loss and grief, or the way that a child's hand tucked inside your own can fill your heart with peace and love--we are constantly rewarded with moments of depth, and consideration for our own frenetic lives.
I'm always drawn to the darker aspects of life, because I find it interesting to see how people deal with conflict and chaos, how characters reveal their true nature in these accelerated moments of anxiety and despair. Amber Sparks is not afraid to step into the darkness and paint bleak portraits of consequence and pain. Take this passage from "When the Weather Changes You":
"You have them, she said, her voice surprisingly deep and strong. You have them in your heart, too. Just like me. Her face was purple and mottled, and her mouth collapsed into itself like a rotten fruit.
What, Gramama, I asked, trying not to get too close. The sour smell of death was in the bedclothes. What do I have in my heart?
Ashes, she said. Your heart is full of ashes."
And this:
"After a while, it became common to see strange snow angels here and there. Dead children splayed in dreadful poses, wingless and blue and covered in ice. The crows would circle in frustration, bewildered by the slow rate of decomposition and decay, unable to peck at the eyeballs hard as glass."
First, this is a horrible thing to say to your great-granddaughter--unless of course, it's true. Then it's something of a gift, isn't it? But the second paragraph, the crows pecking at the frozen eyes of the fallen children, it's a powerful image, haunting and disturbing, stealing a moment from our childhood, these snow angels, and turning them into angels of death.
In this powerful debut collection of short stories, May We Shed These Human Bodies, Amber Sparks has written a surreal love letter to our past histories--placed a message in a bottle and dropped into a raging sea, so that our future loves may hear what we have to say. Maybe these notes will declare our steadfast loyalties and maybe they will be riddled with dark threats and doomsday predictions. Either way, they will certainly not be meek.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Fairy Tales for the 21st Century
By Sara
Copy received through the Goodreads First Reads program.
"There were no books in the Afterwards, which the people thought was some serious bullshit." I fell in love with that line instantly, and it's only 3 pages into the book!
What an odd little collection of short stories. I don't mean that in a disparaging way at all--I think there was only one story in here that didn't really work for me. Several stories toy with experimental story structure, which often puts me off. Here, though, it works. The overarching tone of these tales makes any sort of deviation from the standard seem like a completely natural fit.
Amber Sparks has written diverse set of extremely short, off-kilter, whimsical tales. Many of the stories in this collection are inspired by fairy tales, either directly or in flavor. They are quite short, too. The longest is 12 pages, but there are many that are only a page or two long.
The thing that strikes me most about these stories is how much Sparks says by NOT saying it. One of my literature professors explaining the "iceberg theory" and Hemingway's writing style. The most important elements of the story lie in what is NOT said. 90 percent of an iceberg is below the water's surface, and 90 percent of the meaning of a story lies below the surface, too. The stories in May We Shed These Human Bodies take up a lot more space than the slim volume would indicate.
This is a solid literary effort. I'm looking forward to reading more from Sparks.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Captivating immediately and continuously
By Warren Henderson
I haven't read a lot of short stories recently. I hope this collection doesn't spoil me for others. I found nearly every story captivating, evocative, tightly written and satisfying at the end. Yes, a lot of them tend to be "dark" but it's not darkness borne of hopelessness or pessimism. Rather, it's more often than not a dark magic, a look at aging or death or tragedy or mystery that celebrates what happens or happened without bemoaning it. I often found myself wanting to stop after every story or two to better absorb what I'd just read. Before I read May We Shed These Human Bodies I had no idea what to expect. Now I have no idea to what I can compare it. I loved the collection and can't wait for Ms. Sparks' next collection to be published (toward the end of next January, according to what I'm reading).
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