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Title: The Heaven of Animals
Subtitle: Stories
Author: David James Poissant
Narrator: Susan Bennett, Peter Jay Fernandez, Ken Marks, Richard Poe, Scott Sowers
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
Language: English
Release date: 05-05-14
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 8 votes
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
In this masterful debut, an award-winning writer and first-rate storyteller explores the tenuous bonds of family - fathers and sons, husbands and wives - as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love. In each of the stories in this remarkable collection, David James Poissant delivers a moving portrayal of a relationship in turmoil. His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Some stand frightened, some ready to fight. Some seek atonement, others the atonement that is owed them. But, brought to the brink, each must make a choice: Leap, or look away?
Lee Martin writes that Poissant forces us " to face the people we are when we're alone in the dark", and, from the two men racing to save the life of a sick alligator in "Lizard Man" to the girl helping her boyfriend face his greatest fears in "The End of Aaron", from a son grieving his father in " 100% Cotton" as he stalks death on an Atlanta street corner to a brother' s surprise at the surreal, improbable beauty of a late night encounter with a wolf, Poissant's invented worlds shine with honesty and dark complexity, but also with a profound compassion. These are stories hell-bent on hope. Fresh, smart, lively - and often wickedly funny - The Heaven of Animals is breathtakingly original and compulsively readable. As best-selling author Kevin Wilson puts it, "Poissant is a writer who knows us with such clarity that we wonder how he found his way so easily into our hearts and souls."
Members Reviews:
Thoroughly engaging!
The Heaven of Animals by award-winning author David James Poissant is one of those short story collections in which, as soon as you've read one of the stories, you immediately turn the page to start the next. His characters, all wrestling with damaged relationships, break the reader's heart. Fathers and sons, young married couples, rivaling brothers, and would-be lovers all try to come to grips with their dreams and their failings, massaging their despair until they manage to find a way through it. Many of the stories feature animals, wild and domestic, a reminder that humans are a part of that family, too.
Poissant's writing is straightforward but full of amazing images that stay with the reader long after the book is finished. Two of my favorite stories in the collection are "Amputee," in which a man grieving over his broken marriage encounters a most unusual young girl, and the title story, "The Heaven of Animals," in which a father risks everything to travel to his dying son.
I highly recommend this thoroughly engaging set of stories.
Heartbreakingly real portraits of people you think you know
As I read these stories, I felt as if I were on voyage of discovery. These are the care-worn people doing late night shopping at Wal-Mart. They are the people who sit, straddle-legged and smoking, on their Arizona porches. The author has given me access into their flash-fire moments of anger and their regrets. In "Lizard Man," a father goes crazy when he discovers his son in a clutch with another boy. And, yet, we are right there with him in his body and, thus, sympathetic to his feelings. "...I've been up all night.
