The angel of Rome : and other stories / Jess Walter.

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Title:

The angel of Rome : and other stories / Jess Walter.

Author:

Walter, Jess, 1965- author.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Mr. Voice.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Fran's friend has cancer.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Magnificent desolation.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Drafting.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Before you blow.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Town & country.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Cross the woods.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- To the corner.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Famous actor.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Balloons.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Way the world ends.

ISBN:

9780062868114

Uniform Title:

Short stories. Selections

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

274 pages ; 24 cm

Contents:

Mr. Voice -- Fran's friend has cancer -- Magnificent desolation -- Drafting -- The angel of Rome -- Before you blow -- Town & country -- Cross the woods -- To the corner -- Famous actor -- Balloons -- The way the world ends.

Abstract:

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes--for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous--as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places"-- Provided by publisher.

We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during "the year of my reinvention" finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. -- Adapted from jacket

Subject Term:

Life change events -- Fiction.

Change -- Fiction.

Satire.

FICTION / Satire.

FICTION / Short Stories (single author)

Change. (OCoLC)fst00852051

Life change events. (OCoLC)fst00998231

Satire. (OCoLC)fst01105668

Short stories.

Geographic Term:

Rome (Italy) -- Fiction.

Italy -- Rome. (OCoLC)fst01204500

Genre:

Short stories.

Satirical literature.

Fiction. (OCoLC)fst01423787

Novels. (OCoLC)fst01921742

Satirical literature. (OCoLC)fst01922539

Short stories. (OCoLC)fst01726740

Added Author:

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Mr. Voice.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Fran's friend has cancer.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Magnificent desolation.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Drafting.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Before you blow.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Town & country.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Cross the woods.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- To the corner.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Famous actor.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Balloons.

Container of (work): Walter, Jess, 1965- Way the world ends.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library	Adult Fiction Book Hardback	120791003004376	F WAL	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes--for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous--as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.

Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again "solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds" (Esquire).

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Reading Walter's perceptive collection (after The Cold Millions) is like sitting next to the guy at a dinner party who has something hilarious to say about everyone and knows all their secrets. In the title story, written with actor Edoardo Ballerini, a starry-eyed Nebraska kid spends a year studying in Italy after high school. There, he stumbles onto the set of a film starring a fading Italian bombshell, and the encounter sets off an antic shaggy-dog tale culminating in the students in his Latin class writing a new ending for the movie. Walter is even better in quieter stories like "Drafting," in which a woman battling cancer seeks out an old flame, a 36-year-old perpetually stoned skater dude who, despite his utter fecklessness, is the only person able to quiet her existential dread. Occasionally, Walter's shrewdness about the nature of his characters can feel a little schematic, as in the otherwise entertaining and witty "Famous Actor," involving a hookup between a coffee shop barista and a slumming movie star with a drug problem. The dialogue and setup are great ("It's so great to just be in, like, a fucking apartment," the actor says about the narrator's place), though it ends predictably. Compared to the novels, this is minor Jess Walter, but minor Jess Walter is better than most. (June)

Kirkus Review

A dozen stories spell excellent news for fans of the Bard of Spokane. Since Beautiful Ruins, his 2012 blockbuster, Walter has won a legion of readers who have been through the backlist and impatiently gobbled down his two follow-ups--a story collection, We Live in Water (2013), and the excellent historical novel Cold Millions (2020). This second collection of shorts is a glorious addition to the oeuvre, with a much brighter mood than its gloomy predecessor. The title story, which began its life as an Audible original, is a mini Beautiful Ruins, including an Italian setting, beautiful movie-star character, and heartbreakingly adorable but benighted male protagonist, here a blue-collar boy from Nebraska whose year abroad involves church-sponsored Latin lessons at a "papal community college" in a Roman industrial building. This. Story. Is. So. Damn. Funny. And almost ridiculously heartwarming. But the same can be said of many of the others, no matter how apparently depressing their topic. For example, the story about a father who must be institutionalized, "Town & Country," opens with the fact that "Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street," and creates for the man in question an outlaw assisted living center in a seedy, one-story motel in northern Idaho where the meatloaf is still $2 and all the drinks are doubles. The climate change story, "The Way the World Ends," brings two very depressed Ph.D. students to Mississippi State University to vie for a position in the geosciences department, then throws them together with a three-weeks-out-of-the-closet, very lonely college student named Jeremiah who's trying to decide whether it's worth risking life and limb to march in his first Gay Pride parade. What one of the "climate zealots" says to defend his newfound love of country music resonates through the collection: "Life is hard, the songs seemed to say, but at least it's funny, and it rhymes." Not sure why the author is in such a good mood, but it's contagious. Prepare for delight. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Closely following his historical novel The Cold Millions (2020), Walter's second short-story collection features 12 sparkling, neatly varied pieces that range from Europe to the small towns of rural Washington State, and from the 1970s up to the present. The rambunctious title story shows Walter at his best, as his naive hero--a college student and aspiring writer from Nebraska adrift in Rome in the early '90s--falls in by chance with a beautiful Italian actress and her boisterous American costar. Walter also reveals a gift for darker, more surreal humor, as in "Town & Country," in which the narrator deals with the consequences of his father's dementia, as he places him into a "manufactured Idaho motor hotel of nostalgia and denial." At times, Walter overreaches: the concluding story, "The Way the World Ends," is freighted with more meditations on climate change and racial divides than one antic short story can safely handle. But Walters' compassion, wit, and general charm redeem even this story, and the volume as a whole is a fizzy delight.

Library Journal Review

A collector of honors, with Stegner, Rona Jaffe, and three Pushcart Prizes among them, Conklin offers a Rainbow Rainbow of short stories about queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans characters like the fifth grader who explores gender identity by dressing as an ox--instead of a matriarch--for a school reenactment of the Oregon Trail. After closing out her twice Booker-honored "Wolf Hall" trilogy, Mantel limns the transformative aspects of childhood in the loosely autobiographical stories of Learning To Talk. Author of the New York Times best-selling Three Women and the deliciously contentious debut novel Animal, a personal favorite, Taddeo offers stories (two Pushcart Prize-winning) grounded in the dating service Ghost Lover, a forwarding system for text messages (75,000-copy first printing). In The Angel of Rome, Beautiful Ruins author Walter highlights crucial moments in the lives of his characters, from a teenage girl aspiring to be like her missing mother to a son who must come out repeatedly to a father facing dementia.