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Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories
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Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories
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Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories
Audiobook6 hours

Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

A Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Book for 2014

Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award finalist

In Mr.Tall, his first story collection in two decades, Tony Earley brings us seven rueful, bittersweet, riotous studies of characters both ordinary and mythical, seeking to make sense of the world transforming around them. He demonstrates once again the prodigious storytelling gifts that have made him one of the most accomplished writers of his generation.

In the title story, a lonely young bride terrifyingly shares a remote mountain valley with a larger-than-life neighbor, while the grieving widow of "The Cryptozoologist" is sure she's been visited by a Southern variant of Bigfoot. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?" introduces us to the ghost of Jesse James, who plagues an elderly woman in the wake of a neighborhood girl's abduction. In "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands" a newly empty-nest couple stumbles through an impenetrable Outer Banks fog seeking a new life to replace the one they have lost, while "Yard Art" follows the estranged wife of a famous country singer as she searches for an undiscovered statue by an enigmatic artist. In the concluding novella, "Jack and the Mad Dog," we find Jack-the giant killer of the stories-in full flight from threats both canine and existential.

Earley indelibly maps previously undiscovered territories of the human heart in these melancholy, comic, and occasionally strange stories. Along the way he leads us on a journey from contemporary Nashville to a fantastical land of talking dogs and flying trees, teaching us at every step that, even in the most familiar locales, the ordinary is never just that.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 26, 2014
ISBN9781478977315
Unavailable
Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories

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Reviews for Mr. Tall

Rating: 3.9274193548387095 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A great wordsmith with a wonderful understanding of men AND women, a playfulness couched in wonderful prose and a prodigious imagination.

    I loved reading it for the first time and am already planning to read it again.

    Don't miss it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Terrific writing and stories. The trip up the NC coast and Outer Banks brought back good memories













  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent writing, narration, and stories. I highly recommend! Now I'm off to look for more by this author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Entertainment of this caliber comes along so seldom. It has been a privilege to listen. Thank you. The voices of the story tellers have been the best I have ever listened to. Jack and the Mad Dog was delightful. It took me back to my childhood when an especially talented teacher would read her 3rd grade class classic fairy tales. This has been an insightful and uplifting book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The highest compliment I can pay Tony Earley is this: now I will go out and get all the other things you have written and read them soon. What a great writer! I wasn't in love with the last story in this collection, the fantasy entitled "Jack and the Mad Dog". I had the feeling it may have been purposefully somewhat confusing and so highly nuanced that I need to read it again. Still, I won't love this story. The others I do love.

    Mr. Earley has a gift for detail and human psyche that places the reader so squarely in reality, it's more real than living every day may be. It's unvarnished. And yet it's somehow elegant even if the stories wouldn't be labeled as such in the ordinary way.

    If short stories aren't your favorite, Mr. Earley has written a couple of novels, and everyone should be exposed to his writing.

    I received this book from Goodreads Giveways.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    First night empty nesters, the misunderstood Mr. Tall, the widow of her misunderstood artist husband, Jack of th beanstalk and what happens when we close a book. Are you interested yet? I absolutely loved "Jim The Boy", and Tony Earley once again demonstrates his wonderful storytelling skill in this wonderful collection. Each story is a metaphor about life. Sounds trite, I know, but in this case not so!!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A grouping of stories that I found amazing. In the first story a couple, long married with one child, finds after she foes to college that they are no longer the focus of her life. Empty nest and how do they and their marriage move forward? So realistic as I am sure many of us empty nesters can agree. In another story a couple of high school sweethearts, separated by the war reconnect 45 yrs. later after the death of both of their spouses. My favorite though was the title story. A young girl of 16 marries and lives in a lonely secluded farm, her nearest neighbor is Mr. Tall a man with a tragedy of his own. We meet this young couple again as old people in another story.All in all I loved the writing, the stories were fully developed. The last story is about Jack the giant killer. Does anyone wonder what happened to Jack after he kills the giant? Well we find out this author's version along with a talking dog. One my favorite book of short stories this year.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is Earley's second story collection, after his debut, Here We Are in Paradise. I did not read that one but I have read his novel, Jim the Boy, which was excellent.This is more of a mixed bag. There are seven stories. I liked, Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands, which kicks off the collection and I also liked the title story. The novella-sized neo-fairytale, which concludes, this book, didn't quite work for me, although I did admire it's creativity and boldness. I may have to revisit these stories at some point and see if I missed something.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Darryl and Cheryl were married in a civil ceremony in South Carolina because the idea of their families mixing at a formal wedding was simply too painful to contemplate.This is a wonderfully crafted collection by Tony Earley. Set in North Carolina and various parts of the Southern Appalachia, it is a diverse, witty and compelling collection. Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands is the first story and concerns a couple who have just had an unsettling visit with their college-age daughter and who then venture further afield for a brief getaway in the Outer Banks, as the fault lines in their marriage become increasingly hard to ignore, while the titular story follows Plutina, as she marries and moves away from home for the first time and up to an isolated mountain farm in 1932, with her equally young husband, Charlie. Each story moves in unexpected directions that make perfect sense. From The Cryptozoologist, where a woman reflects on her marriage to an older artist, while the FBI hunts the surrounding area for a wanted murderer, to Just Married, where Early ties together three seemingly unrelated stories, each tale reflects on relationships, from the tentative to the long-lasting. The final, longer story is different, being a meta-fairy tale in which a local folktale character, Jack, confronts his own history as well as his disappearance from local knowledge, met along the way by Tom Dooley, of the ballad, and some of the people Jack has wronged. And as a child of the mountains his aversion to blank horizons was inbred and inalienable. Jack thought, How bleak a vista viewed from the doldrums of a squandered life! Then he spat disgustedly because, as a plot man, he distrusted metaphor.This is the first book I have read by Tony Earley, but it won't be the last. His stories are deeply rooted in the mountains of Appalachia and the South and remind me of Ron Rash and Tim Gautreaux.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not my favorite form of storytelling but interesting nonetheless.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of six short stories and one novella, all set in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. The novella, "Jack and the Mad Dog," is a sort of meta-fairy tale, and very much my sort of thing. It's clever and funny and thoughtful, with a real punch of an ending. The other stories, despite a brief appearance by Bigfoot, are more realistic, and are all well-written, with believable characters. A couple of them, as is often the case for me with slice-of-life literary stories, left me sort of thinking, "Yes, and...?" at the end, as if something in my brain were still waiting for the author to include some sort of plot or point. Others, however -- probably half of them -- are perfectly self-contained little gems. Overall, a good collection, and well worth a look.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought this anthology was very enjoyable, the stories are quirky and amusing and dark and disturbing an interesting blend. The novella is a fairy tale, nursery rhyme mash-up and is a strange and fitting finale to the book. Rather than attempt to recap each of the stories, I'll just repeat that I found them enjoyable. My thanks to the author and publisher who used NetGalley to provide me with the copy to read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a very enjoyable collection of short stories. I actually found this book by chance in a Little Free Library. I'd never heard of the author before, but I just started glancing at the title story out of curiosity. Before I knew it, I'd finished reading the whole book. The real hook for me was that the first story, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands", was set in familiar places along the shore of North Carolina. I related easily to the couple traveling from the southern shores of that state to the Outer Banks. I also remember quite a drive through heavy fog on the ocean-side highway. The memories this story brought me carried me through this story ..and then the entire book. Every story was completely different, each with its own quirky characters. One character, Fieldin Kohler, in the story "The Cryptozoologist" was described like this..."an emaciated praying mantis of a man who stuffed the legs of his paint-spattered chinos into knee-high fringed moccasins." You want to learn more about this character, right? He was a music teacher. There are lines throughout that will make you laugh out loud. The last story, sort of a fantasy novella was called "Jack and the Mad Dog". One of its characters was Tom Dooley. A line from this story was..."Tom Dooley hung down his head." Yeah. Right. Haha!Another few lines that cracked me up were these..."The next morning, she took to town the credit card that her father had given her to use in case of emergency and purchased a chain saw (Later when her father received the bill, he canceled the card.)"Descriptions of everything from the changing settings to the personalities of the characters were very detailed and colorful. This was quite a delightful reading experience. The stories were intertwined, sometimes with just the name of a place; at other times, with some of the same characters! It was interesting to me as well to to find Jewish characters popping up out of nowhere. This was rural North Carolina!Oh, my! Do give me more books by this author to read!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was disappointed by Tony Earley's new MR. TALL a novella and stories. His two earlier novels JIM THE BOY and THE BLUE STAR were wonderful. His prose is almost Young Adult in feeling and his two earlier novels were spectacular. Refreshing story and great prose. This new book is not remotely like the earlier ones. The first story HAUNTED CASTLES OF THE BARRIER ISLANDS was in keeping with his earlier work. It was the best story in the book. Then came MR TALL the title story that was pretty good. After that it was all downhill. I encourage you to read his two earlier novels.

    1 person found this helpful