[ISS]∎ Download Gratis Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups Christopher DeWan 9780991546961 Books

Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups Christopher DeWan 9780991546961 Books

Download As PDF : Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups Christopher DeWan 9780991546961 Books

Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups Christopher DeWan 9780991546961 Books

Collections of short stories, flash fiction & microfiction, such as this book, can sometimes be a lot like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates - you don't know what you are going to get... There will be some chocolates with centers you love and other chocolates you hate. This book is the exception to this rule - every story (45 in all) is worth reading. There are no Orange Cremes* in this collection. The stories - some of which are very short, almost haiku-length - cover a wide range of topics - as the cover blurb says, these are fairy tales for grown-ups - however throughout many of them there is a tone of bitter-sweet surrealism that reminds me of some of the early songs by Paul Simon. Read this book and you'll find yourself singing the chorus from "America". And yes, there is a time machine in the collection but only a hoopty time machine. (I'm from the UK and not only is the Orange Creme my personal least favourite selection box center but it is apparently the least favourite chocolate nationwide.)


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Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups Christopher DeWan 9780991546961 Books Reviews

Every child hears “Once upon a time” and immediately knows that “happily ever after” is on its way. Snow White is woken up with Prince Charming’s kiss. Ariel gets her legs and her man. Cinderella is reunited with her precious glass slipper and her true love. But what happens when you wander off into your own once upon a time, only to find that Cinderella’s other shoe has dropped on your head? Suddenly you’re sitting on the commuter train, heading into another Monday of sucking down crappy coffee in that tiny office it took you five years of making copies and running office lunch orders to get promoted to.

Now you’re thinking happily ever after might just be for fairy tales after all.
Welcome to the world of Christopher DeWan’s Hoopty Time Machines, a collection of fairy tales for adults that transports you far, far away from “happily ever after” and more towards “moderately satisfying reality.” In forty-five short stories, DeWan takes the hopefulness of a child’s fairy tale and throws it into the adult world, where things don’t always go perfectly wrong -- they just go wrong.

Throughout this collection, DeWan captures how overwhelmed we can feel when we finally stop moving-moving-moving for a few seconds, and he makes us ache over the composition of small moments in our lives that never came to be. In “Sacramento,” he is able, in just one sentence, to break our hearts over all that we never even knew “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.” His stories examine that moment of escape where readers can imagine all the possibilities of how they want life to be, before they have to face how it actually is.

The real twist of this collection is that in some cases, these characters do reach a point where they can look back and settle into the realization that they are happy, just without taking the exact route they had originally mapped out. DeWan steps away from what children initially believe will make them happy, and instead pulls a more realistic happy ending under the microscope for a closer look.

While children dream of growing up, grown-ups dream to escape it. When the bills start piling up and you’re spending Friday night buried in a stack of paperwork, your idea of happy looks less like true love’s kiss and more like accidentally-on-purpose hitting your snooze button a few more times. Hoopty Time Machines gathers all of these little things and turns them into one big thing -- the mediocre but satisfying grind of reality. Whether it be a day alone, finally getting the baby to fall asleep, throwing out those dusty stacks of magazines, or having the guts to ditch your office job to chase the American Dream, the ending can still be happy, even if it isn’t as grand as you’d imagined as a kid.

These stories show us one of the most valuable lessons when it comes to happy endings they are rarely free. Even when we make it to our happy endings, it is not because the universe decided to just let everything fall into place. While the characters in Disney movies get to take a nap while they wait for life to work itself out, reality doesn’t work that way. In his short story “Indestructible,” DeWan makes miracles happen when an eight year-old defeats her battle with cancer -- only then, though, does her real-world battle with doctor’s bills begin. He recognizes the reality that you need to fight for any happy ending you get, whether it’s delivery is how you imagined it or not.

Hoopty Time Machines dispels the idea that all happily ever afters are the same, while perfectly amplifying the messiness of life that may not always drive you straight off into the sunset, but will still take you somewhere worthwhile.
Beautiful, wistful, magical. This book sneaks up on you with subtle power. Loved it.
First-rate, inventive, mind-bending fiction. Each story is like a shot of bourbon, short and strong, with subtle and surprising flavors.
This is a collection of flash fiction - tiny stories, often less than a page long, that blur the lines between poetry, confession, and narrative. Though they are small, they punch way beyond their weight class. These will find a place to hide in your brain, where they grow into something bigger, and more complex. This is a great collection, expertly crafted and highly recommended, especially if you are a fan of the strange magic worked by artists such as Kelly Link.
Christopher DeWan’s Hoopty Time Machines Fairy Tales for Grown Ups (Atticus Books) is a fabulous collection of fabulist miniatures, where you’ll find monsters, in a labyrinth, in a well, and innumerable creatures in and out of holes, drains, pipes, wells; where you’ll find an atheist bearing stigmata, an obsessive wallpaper-er, a boy changeling, trolls, conscious salmon, an un-scary bogeyman, a haiku-reading Godzilla, Poseidon’s cuckold, Frankenstein’s cuckquean; and defamiliarized myths and legends sending up Goldilocks, Ulysses, Shiva, Theseus, Superman, and others. These “fairy tales for grown-ups” offer satirical takes of post-industrial society, clever plays on social media and the blogosphere, bringing to the surface its resulting angst, anonymity, and loneliness. These stories are among my favorites “Intrusion,” “The Bundle,” “Blog of the Last Man on Earth,” “The Fibonacci Forest,” “The Garden,” and “Rapunzel’s Tangles.” (less)
A beautiful, compelling work. These are fairy tales for right now, the kind of necessary stories that are not disconnected from our own world like the old ones are, but ones set (mostly) in the heart of America. Like any good fairy tale, these stories question our own understanding of our selves and the world we live in. They're also funny! If Rapunzel, Godzilla, the Minotaur and my grandmother from the old neighborhood all got together and wanted to have a drink and a book club, this would be what they'd read.
Collections of short stories, flash fiction & microfiction, such as this book, can sometimes be a lot like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates - you don't know what you are going to get... There will be some chocolates with centers you love and other chocolates you hate. This book is the exception to this rule - every story (45 in all) is worth reading. There are no Orange Cremes* in this collection. The stories - some of which are very short, almost haiku-length - cover a wide range of topics - as the cover blurb says, these are fairy tales for grown-ups - however throughout many of them there is a tone of bitter-sweet surrealism that reminds me of some of the early songs by Paul Simon. Read this book and you'll find yourself singing the chorus from "America". And yes, there is a time machine in the collection but only a hoopty time machine. (I'm from the UK and not only is the Orange Creme my personal least favourite selection box center but it is apparently the least favourite chocolate nationwide.)