ENG 263: The Love Story

Even in the first few lines of Campbell’s “Falling,” I was already strikingly aware of how different this story was from anything else we have read. The story is written in first person, but the gender of the speaker wasn’t obvious until she says “a woman like me,” (pg. 108). In fact, I was under […]

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In Tony Earley’s story, “Charlotte,” the description of the bar on page 37 is done in such a easily relatable way. The details are generic to a bar of it’s kind, but it works because most everyone knows and/or has been to a bar exactly like this – PJ’s is familiar to the reader. The […]

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“Charlotte” by Tony Earley is a weirdly interesting story. There is a lot going on in the story but the author manages to keep it all straight and concise without losing the reader. There is the fact that all the wrestlers left Charlotte, the poetry, the narrator’s love for Starla, the wrestling match, the bar, […]

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“Charlotte” is definitely not what I was expecting.  When I first started reading the story I was dreading it.  The moment I saw wrestlers I was put off but almost immediately I was drawn back in.  Earley’s style is very different from Hempel’s.  While I wouldn’t say that his writing is straightforward, it was easier […]

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Gone are the Thundercats, Bill and Steve, and the Hidden Pagans with their shiny red masks and secret signs; gone ais Paolo the Peruvian…” –Tony Earley, “Charlotte” The wrestlers were, once upon a time, the trophies of Charlotte. You don’t know their real names, or you know part of their names, and that is how […]

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I think one of the most impressive bits of this piece is the tone; as a reader, you understand that the “I” character feels hostile towards her deceased husband, but after rereading it, I noticed he never actually did anything mean to her. It sounds like he loved her unconditionally, which we don’t know for […]

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In both Amy Hempel’s “The Dog of the Marriage” and “Nashville Gone to Ashes” I think it is very clever that she chose dogs to interweave with her narrative about men, although I would argue to say that by mere page time men are the side characters in these stories. Similarly, she uses the chimp […]

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Amy Hempel’s writing can be confusing at time and requires close reading. Through any possible confusion the aspect of the stories that stands out and guides the reader through the story is the narrator. This story is almost necessarily written in first person. The view of the narrator, the voice and the characteristics of the […]

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When reading this short story I was largely reminded of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars,” a story in which boy meets girl but boy and girl are both terminally ill. But it seems in Hempel’s stories the reader is introduced to a new kind of love story. In her other stories, “Dog of […]

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Amy Hempel has a beautiful, yet sometimes confusing, style of writing.  Her story, “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” is heart wrenching.  From the beginning with the line, “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” you instantly get this feeling of dread.  But, just like her other works like “Nashville Gone to Ashes” […]

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