Antonya Nelson
Funny Once
(Bloomsbury, May 2014)
The landscape of this book is the wide open spaces of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Throughout, there is the pervasive desire to drink to forget, to have sex with the wrong people, to hit the road and figure out later where to stop for the night. These characters are aging, regretting actions both taken and not…in Funny Once, their flawed humanity is made beautiful, perfectly observed by one of America’s best short story writers.
Praise for Funny Once
“Nelson’s stories are frequently anthologized, and for good reason: they feature memorable, albeit often desperately unhappy, characters; evocative Southwestern settings; and a refreshing frankness about the emptiness of modern life. She starts her fifth collection (after Female Trouble) at the peak of her game, with the haunting “Literally,” in which a widower struggles to protect his children (and their maid) from life’s harsh realities.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In her immersive new collection of nine stories and a novella, Nelson (Bound, 2010, etc.), a much lauded novelist and short story writer, introduces not-always-happy or well-behaved protagonists who make questionable choices… “iff”—a rich example of Nelson’s ability to conjure a fully peopled scenario in only 20 pages—reveals the poignantly interdependent relationship between a divorced woman and her ex-mother-in-law… These stories are set in scattered cities—Albuquerque, Houston, Telluride, Chicago—and focus on everyday families dealing with long-resonant emotions… Distinctive, quirky stories that deftly capture some of life’s messiness.”
–Kirkus Review
“Commitment to living is a tenuous thing in Funny Once, Antonya Nelson’s collection of nine beautifully observed short stories and a novella. Suicide is a recurring theme; a small dog is named Sylvia Plath. Nelson’s characters are a restless lot, their commitments to each other conditional. Marriage is a serial condition, boredom a suitable excuse for moving on. But they’re aspirational in their way. Drunk one evening, the mother of a faraway married son wishes he’d get his old girlfriend pregnant so she could have a grandchild. “She wanted another chance at loving somebody.” For that, a person might stick around.”
–The Boston Globe
“Antonya Nelson’s seventh collection delivers 10 stories rich with her signature wit and style…Nelson’s incisive gaze strips the domestic of its veil of normalcy and leaves her characters exposed—as much for our empathy as for our judgment. At the heart of each of these stories are women—capricious, careful, inquisitive, and oblivious—who defy easy assessment, and whom Nelson refuses to reduce to types Readers weary of the women portrayed by literary fiction’s good ol’ boys will rejoice in Nelson’s astute depiction of the uncomfortable marriage between the sides we show and those we hide. Wondering where the short story is headed now that Alice Munro has her Nobel? Rest assured: there’s a new captain at the helm.”
–BUST Magazine (5 out of 5 boobs)
“[These stories] reflect the times in which we live and move us to reflect on our own lives, on our relationships, our wounds, what we use to get through our days. In her stories we encounter the complex lives of others and perhaps grow in our empathy and understanding.”
–The Wichita Eagle
“Antonya Nelson proves a shrewd sounding board for the absurdities of life in Funny Once, a series of short stories…Nelson weaves surprises and epiphanies in spaces that usually seem mundane, ordinary and depressingly, hysterically human… A master of the domestic drama, Nelson tailors the stories in Funny Once from the broad human tapestries of marriage, divorce, infidelity, love, loss, adolescence, aging and death. She creates touching, carefully crafted dioramas of the familiar neighborhoods, living rooms and bedrooms of Houston and the expansive endlessness of other places, including Colorado and Kansas…The mark of a good storyteller is the ability to make every plot fresh and engaging, which Nelson does as masterfully as a beauty shop gossip, arousing my undivided attention to these recurring, timeless themes…We’re expected to laugh at our shortcomings at some point in the near or extended future, and it is one of life’s absurdities to live in too much misbegotten mirth. But betrayal, infidelity, loss and loneliness are only as funny as the awkward angle at which one hits a funny bone, all nerve-endings and numbness. It’s an angle that Nelson targets artfully and methodically — and hits dead-on.”
– The Houston Chronicle
“Winner of the 2003 Rea Award for the Short Story and author of seven story collections and four novels, Nelson (Bound) has perfected the fiction of character and place. These 10 new stories are set in her home turf of New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Colorado–far from the celebrity glare of the coasts. Their characters wrestle with infidelity, inebriation, and infirmity… With an eye for the humorous contradictions and misplaced passions of people wanting badly but failing to connect, Nelson’s stories remind us that in the end there is nothing funny about the emotional distress of relationships–at least not more than once.”
–Shelf Awareness
“Antonya Nelson’s gloriously debauched new collection, Funny Once, finds that conventions are made for flouting, from an eminent professor who sleeps with his young wife’s best friend to former college competitors who embark on a lost weekend.”
―Vogue
“[Nelson shows] great talent in constructing each story in its own unique world . . . [She] makes sure that we see the silliness alongside the strife, and the heart within the hardships.”
―Time Out New York, four stars
“Nelson’s stories are busy, noisy, crowded affairs that jump straight into the center of the conflict . . . Nelson treats [her characters’] weaknesses with high-spirited humor and ample forgiveness. ‘If you took all the lessons of others, you might never do anything,’ thinks an indulgent grandmother in ‘First Husband.’ And if people stopped screwing up, we wouldn’t have any more of Ms. Nelson’s excellent stories to read.”
―Wall Street Journal
“In her rewarding new collection, Funny Once, Antonya Nelson expertly dissects the lives of her troubled Midwestern and mountain-time characters–frantic teens, finicky fathers, abandoned wives, know-it-all neighbors, sorrowful siblings, festering friendships–dosing their domestic dramas and existential hurts with splendid shots of unexpected whimsy, familiar pleasures, and incurable love.”
―Elle
“Nelson’s run as one of the finest contemporary short story writers takes an exhilarating leap forward with her outrageously superb seventh collection. Her particular wizardry in the short form (Nelson is also the author of four novels) is found in her exceptional melding of pristine prose with a rampaging imagination and a comic’s perfect timing. Nelson is scandalously funny, her characters are royally screwed up and wildly inept, and their dire predicaments bust down the doors on the most painful of life’s cruel jokes, from betrayal to divorce, addiction, and old age. Nelson excels at multigenerational chaos, portraying with equal verve surprising children and ornery adults as well as neurotic dogs and places rife with hidden angst, namely Wichita, Telluride, and Houston . . . Each of Nelson’s magnetizing stories generates atomic vibrancy and achieves the psychic mass of a novel.”
―Booklist, starred review
“Graced with credible characters whose friendships, marriages, progeny, and divorces feel familiar and lived in, Nelson’s supple stories have appeared in prestigious magazines and prize anthologies for two decades. This seventh short story collection (her tenth book of fiction) will delight longtime fans while likely propelling new readers to explore her earlier work. . . . The narratives are driven by characters whose crises and moments of insight take the reader by surprise, but Nelson herself is completely in control of her complex tales, in which infidelities are exposed or never quite happen and old friends surprise one another with new revelations that take 20 pages to unfold. . . . Nelson is one of the leading practitioners of the contemporary short story.”
―Library Journal, starred review
Antonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including the collections Female Trouble and Nothing Right, and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Bound. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and many other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and, recently, the Rea Award for Short Fiction. Nelson lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.