You can't rush great fiction, and that's exactly what Hempel delivers in her new collection, Sing to It. The fifteen stories in Hempel's new book showcase the author's immense talents, and prove that she's one of the most vital authors of short fiction writing today ... There's not a story in Sing to It that's less than brilliant, and the collection itself is even greater than the sum of its parts. Hempel occasionally draws comparisons to authors like Mary Robison and Joy Williams, but she writes like nobody else — she's an irreplaceable literary treasure who has mastered the art of the short story more skillfully than just about any other writer out there. Sing to It is a quiet masterpiece by a true American original.
In 15 audacious stories, Hempel creates an uncanny and mesmerizing universe ... Throughout, Hempel asks: When is singing a form of denial, an act of occlusion, a whistling in the wind, and when is it a genuinely healing, redemptive, liberating act? Her own song is at once stark and resonant, witty and plaintive, buoyant and wistful, and this collection one of the most original and beautiful in recent memory.
Hempel works carefully, sparingly, glancingly. Perhaps, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, she learned from her teacher Gordon Lish how to abolish the nonessential, but then she got to work on the essential. Her stories assemble extraordinary sentences. And each purified sentence is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma ... And [Hempel's] characters often speak as sparklingly and strangely as their creator writes ... Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue. It’s astonishing how little she needs to get something up and going on the page ... Like Paley, who has clearly been an influence, [Hempel] is easy to read and sometimes harder to comprehend. Her sentences are not complex, but the speed of their connection to one another is a little breathtaking. You need to slow down in order to go as quickly as Hempel is travelling. Like Paley, she is a natural storyteller who is also very interested in the artifice of storytelling—in the ways that stories deform or hide the truth, in what can and can’t be disclosed on the page. She is a self-reflexive writer who, miraculously, doesn’t seem self-conscious.
Hempel’s background in journalism—she started out as a medical reporter—taught her the value of grabbing a reader from the start ... As in all her best stories, Hempel plants a small bomb with a surprisingly powerful detonation. When other stories in this volume fail to yield the same richness, it’s because the connections that should feel organic are instead forced or just unfulfilled ... Hempel’s method of transmuting life into fiction is nothing if not exacting ... The best of [Hempel's sentences]—riveting in their precision—also take on new lives of their own.
Ms. Hempel’s prose is characteristically spare—some stories are no longer than a page—but in that care and precision, scintillating as the blade of knife ... This singing-to-danger is most apparent in the lyricism of 'A Full-Service Shelter,' but in fact all the stories here are songs of sorts. When there is a shock, a crisis, a scene of horror, Ms. Hempel sings to it, and the result is an exquisite collection by a master of the genre.
Closely observed, funny, crushing, provocative, damaged, and sometimes desperate: Hempel also has the cool courage not to go too far, to build a world, stab at it a few times, let it bleed and then she’s done ... During one bonkers section, Hempel shows how much fun she can have probing first the quotidian and then the largest questions we can ask ourselves ...What do we want from short stories? What can they do? It’s tempting to greet another short-story collection with a sigh, to yearn instead for the sustained nourishment of a novel or memoir. But it’s almost audible, the delicious click when a Hempel idea clicks into place.
The good news is that [Hempel] is still funny, still sneaking in the oblique details that move an ordinary story ... Hempel’s empathy with the secret lives of her characters is epic ... The title story is Hempel’s sort of masterpiece ... The story and the collection insist that each one is irreplaceable ... Many of the stories here don’t have a traditional narrative arc. The have loss; they have laughter in spite of everything ... Hempel’s narrators shuffle through the moods of their lives, remembering but not regulated by the past. They laugh it all off and choose pliable, singing futures.
In every respect, Sing to It is vintage Hempel ... Hempel prefers to focus on the aftermath of catastrophes rather than the catastrophes themselves, on the absences and silences they create as well as the details through which we see them. It’s telling that Hempel’s greatest fans tend to be writers themselves ... Like the best Hempel stories, Cloudland swallows female pain and speaks of it at the same time. It figures danger, failure, and grief as inescapable features of life, and of women’s lives in particular. And it’s not even especially depressing.
Amy Hempel’s Sing to It trails its author’s vaunted reputation behind it like an airplane banner ... [Hempel is] rightly famous for the clarity and impact of her lean, declarative prose ... Many of the entries here are only a few spare paragraphs, often not even enough to fill a single page. 'The Orphan Lamb' is a tiny jewel of brevity — a perfect snapshot, everything clean and sharp and necessary ... Mortality runs through nearly every story — illness, injury, catalogs of lost and broken things — but there’s a cheerful fatalism to it all, too; a sort of so-what serenity prayer.
Hempel’s stories are miracles of economy and compression, from which everything expendable has been withdrawn, leaving only a breadcrumb trail of vivid opacities ... With Hempel, we never feel trapped inside narrative; reading her is like being released back into life ... It is not just the sentences themselves but the manner in which Hempel connects one to another that is remarkable. Her stories are full of blanks and omissions, which reveal an invisible architecture. The manner in which Hempel connects one sentence to another is no less remarkable ... In Hempel’s hands, storytelling is a form of seduction that lifts the veil from our eyes even as it enchants.
Only roughly half of the flash fiction builds a credible triumvirate of character, incident and meaning — including the title story, which ponders the inescapability of metaphor. Some of the rest feel insignificant ... Ending with a novella feels like a jolting change of gears. Couldn’t this story have been just as powerful, or even more so, at a fraction of the length? Isn’t the point of short fiction to convey as much as possible, in as few words as possible? (No matter that it doesn’t hold true for all the stories in this particular book.) ... Dark? Yes, but humor and a love of language shine through. And anyway, these stories are all about, to borrow Bertolt Brecht’s phrasing, singing in these dark times.
Hempel reaffirms her diamond reputation as a writer of gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic tales. Hempel’s forte is the inner monologue, which, in these 15 incisive stories, ranges in form from brief but reverberating prose poems to sustained tales saturated with evocative detail and evolving emotions ... Hempel is a master miniaturist, capturing in exquisitely nuanced sentences the sensuous, cerebral, and spiritual cascade of existence, homing in on pain and humor and the wisdom each can engender.
The danger in Hempel’s stories is oblique. It creeps up in the midst of safety and cracks open retired lives ... Hempel’s stripped-down prose carries enormous emotional weight. Her writing is devoid of all clichés. It carries whole lives in small phrases, fragile and ready to break open.
Amy Hempel writes ideal fiction for our fast-paced times ... The aspirational nature of Hempel’s writing comes from the fact that, unlike social media ephemera, her stories will burrow inside you, dogging your thoughts for days ... Hempel is a skilled stylist, whether building grand structures from spare resources or using a common rhetorical device such as anaphora, the repetition of words at the beginning of successive sentences.
Sing To It... is likely to feel as refreshing to fans of her distinctive stories as a desert oasis. Unfortunately, for all of Hempel’s skill as an accomplished literary miniaturist, with the exception of the compelling novella that makes up nearly half the book, there’s barely enough material here to whet the appetite of newcomers to her work. ... In short, there’s much to admire in Sing To It, but from a writer as good as Amy Hempel, one wishes there was more to love.
Hempel is renowned for fiction that is often just a page or two in length, but it turns out she is equally adept in a much longer form such as the novella that takes up the second half of the book ... Cloudland is one of those pieces of writing that is so gripping when you are in the midst of it that you don’t realize until you’re finished that you’ve actually been reading a work of literature, something that will be around for a very long time.
... wildly exploratory ... a nice mix of flash fiction and longer entries ... It's as if Hempel has a secret guide to her own creations, knowing the point of inflection for each ... If some of the flash fiction pieces feel slight, Hempel makes up for it in Cloudland ... Hempel creates an all-too-human character looking to escape the past but stymied by an equally menacing future ... Sing to It fascinates. It pulses with absurdist glee, but has enough humanity to ground its characters in the hard work of looking forward.
he reader might imagine the briefer stories to be a sign of the times, a nod to flash fiction. But it’s more likely to be a choice of substance, not form, from a genius of succinct narrative. Throughout this collection, and especially in these shortest pieces, the haiku-like prose is condensed and concentrated. Intense and sparse, there is a bleached and stripped quality to Hempel’s writing. Her narrators, reluctant to yield up their secrets, force us to read between the lines. The reader is left, generally, with a lot of work to do ... Rendered here is a disconcerting world of love, loss, longing, and regret, where there is little embellishment or flourish, and even less comfort ... As ever with Hempel, there is that narrative voice that manages, at once, to be both shredded and luscious; saying little but saying a lot ... But it has to be said that some of the stories, and the shortest ones in particular, almost implode into the void of their sparsity. They seem starved of oxygen, and thus at times are not accomplished organically ... Hempel’s ability to compress meaning is plain. But it may be overdone in these vignettes, these fragments of stories in which the reader has too little to work with. It feels, in places, like a wireframe instead of a skeleton, and very little like a body ... No wonder, then, that Sing to It lights up in the longer stories. It’s not because the narrative voice changes from its usual level of brevity and concentration. It’s because there is space for a little more objective meaning to engage the reader, for the work to be more fully accomplished ... the narrative is barely sustained sometimes, a dilemma which is both emblematic of Hempel’s skill and symptomatic of the struggle that attends some of the stories.
Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss ... The brilliance of the writing, however, resides in the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her narrator’s reticence, teaching us to read between the lines ... Hempel’s great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally reckon with themselves.
...15 characteristically bold, disconcerting, knockout stories ... The volume ends with the remarkable 62-page 'Cloudland,' a visually rich, heart-wrenching portrait of a Florida caregiver ... In stories that can be funny, brutal, poetic, blunt, elusive, or all of the above, this accomplished collection highlights Hempel's signature style with its condensed prose, quirky narrators, and touching, disturbing, transcendent moments.
