FABClub (Female Authors Book Club) discussion

Next up, this short short story collection.

This one is next on my pile!

Most of these are just three or four pages long. These are the contents:
Bad News
The Little Red Hen Tells All
Gertrude Talks Back
There Was Once
Unpopular Gals
Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women
The Female Body
In Love With Raymond Chandler
Stump Hunting
Making a Man
Epaulettes
Cold-Blooded
Men at Sea
Alien Territory (by far the longest at 14 pages)
Adventure Story
Hardball
My Life as a Bat
Theology
An Angel
Poppies: Three Variations
Homelanding
Third Handed
Death Scenes
Four Small Paragraphs
We Want It All
Dance of the Lepers
Good Bones

These are tiny little stories, perhaps what she earlier called prose poems. Funny, silly, pointed. "There Was Once" is quite amusing.

I thought section 4 of "The Female Body" was hilarious! This is Margaret Atwood being very, very funny!

Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women is my favourite from this collection.

I really liked "My Life as a Bat." These really need to be taken in small bites though! Not a book I could sit down and read cover-to-cover.

What I finally decided about this:
Some of these are very, very funny, and some of these are painfully ironic, and most of them are quite deliciously pointed. Many of them are gems. However, as a collection, they all felt a bit too precious to me. Or perhaps it’s just that I can only take so much silly, snarky humor at a time. This needs to be read very slowly, when one is in the humor for a small piece of irony served up with great precision.

I'm enjoying this collection so far, though admittedly am glazing over some of the pieces that don't have enough depth. So far I have really enjoyed There Was Once, The Female Body, and Cold Blooded.