This could be a very short review. Read this book. But don’t read it as I did. Please, not as I read it. All right: I guess I had better explain.
Book reviewers must have deadlines. Readers, luckily, do not. Amy Hempel’s “Collected Stories” is made up of four slim volumes: “Reasons to Live,” published in 1985; “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,” 1990; “Tumble Home,” 1997; and “The Dog of the Marriage,” 2005. More than 20 years to accumulate just over 400 pages: it’s no wonder these stories, which often have the outward appearance of fragments, move with such contained power. They are eerie, unsettling, always original and perfectly expressed. Each one sets itself off like a depth charge in the reader’s head…
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