Link Ph Ph من عند Karli, Maharashtra, الهند
Good tool that serves as a refresher course in psychomarketing. Well written and thought provoking.
Really enjoyable. The first half of the book focuses on the appearances (and more importantly, the disappearances) of Leon Meed, who shows up randomly, and then disappears within moments. These events are of course disturbing to the residents of Eureka who witness them. Eureka is a small enough town that many of the witnesses' lives intersect each other to some extent. There's an air of mystery to the first half of the book. Ten years later, the witnesses learn that Leon Meed has died. This half of the book focuses on the interpretation each of the witnesses has made of their brief encounter with him, and how their lives have been impacted over the course of the years. Emmons' writing is pretty, and his character development is thoughtful.
Flannery O'Connor is an amazing writer, and each of these nine stories is amazing, even if she tends to get a bit moralistic about moralists (she really, really doesn't seem to like white people who want to help black people -- whether she likes black people at all is another question). BUT -- (thunderclap) -- I've only ever encountered her fiction before in collections of short stories by various authors, and I think that's a better way to encounter it. Reading these nine stories in a row, I started to get kind of bored with family members who hate each other meeting violent deaths (which, you know, normally I'm just totally into), and so, yeah, the stories started getting predictable. And they don't really survive predictability.