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Rating: 
Summary: Don't let the shortness and simplicity fool you...
Review: ...this is an amazing piece of work. I loved reading Tumble Home. This short-story collection is brief (only 160 pages long) and the stories are deceptively simple. But each story holds profound messages centered on family life and other every day events that may seem insignificant at first glance. My favorite stories are "Sportsman," "The New Lodger," "The Children's Party," and the novella "Tumble Home." Again, the stories are very short, but nevertheless beautiful. Amy Hempel's writing is sparse but possesses such beautiful prose that I just couldn't put this collection down. Hers is a voice that sounds poetic at times. I recommend this book to all short-story lovers.
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Summary: Shorts YES! Nouvella No!
Review: Amy Hempel is an anorexic writer. She is right down to the bones. It's impossible to find any excessive or fat words in her text. Although easily digested, her words remain so chocked full of minerals, vitamins, and vitality that you simply cannot find another contemporary writer that gives you more of a reading work-out in so little time. The short stories in this compilation live up to this streamlined reputation; however, the novella, Tumble Home, left me tumbling back to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Gillman's feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. I was left thinking that I had read it somewhere before, perhaps on a plane, or before a nap. No new territory here, but the prelude to it, the skinny part, makes it worth the voyage.
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Summary: "I am not quite myself, I think."--Tumble Home
Review: Amy Hempel's beautiful novella, Tumble Home, takes the form of a an epistolary journal. A woman in an upscale halfway house--different from mental health facilities I have visited-- writes a letter to an artist she has met only once. Much of this letter is hilarious: she writes about pet therapy at a nearby veterinarian's, and watching TV with her fellow patients. "There is a television in here now. I'll watch whatever is on, such as the swimsuit special that I watched with Warren. It was actually about the making of the special, and it intercut footage of the models arching their backs in the surf with segments in which the photographer described what he had to do to get that shot. Warren became irritated by the photographer's intrusion. He said it was like being a teenager and trying to masturbate to Petticoat Junction..." Hempel is a talented poet whose work I respect and love. This novella could be paired with Hortense Calisher's In the Slammer with Carol Smith, a novel written in the form of a journal by an intelligent bag lady who has been homeless.
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Summary: "I am not quite myself, I think."--Tumble Home
Review: Hempel is a master at weaving different voices and styles through her short stories and novellas. She, at times, borders on almost a prosetry in her work which some may find difficult, but I believe is bold, insightful, and some of the best writing in America today.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Hempel is a master at weaving different voices and styles through her short stories and novellas. She, at times, borders on almost a prosetry in her work which some may find difficult, but I believe is bold, insightful, and some of the best writing in America today.
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Summary: So short yet long
Review: Hempel's slim novella 'Tumble Home,' has a hypnotic prose that leaves the reader concentrating on every word. The short stories are so earthy you feel as if you're among family. Minimalism has never been used so effectively with Hempel's description of everyday americana.
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Summary: Not a big fan
Review: I am usually a really big fan of short stories, but this book just didn't grab me...I can't say that I even LIKED one of the short stories...
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Summary: A sublime book.
Review: In a decade of flabby mass-dense but weightless prose, when PCs coax 800 page novels from 3 page brains and there is no fiction that has enough edge to cut soft butter, in a time when short stories are carelessly wrought retreads of rehashed earlier stories, inflicted on readers in the borrowed and depressing syntax of 1950's hackiest fictions, in these bleak days there is one writer, one yet, who still works to make us wince, or laugh out loud, or see the world made new. Look to her tropes, her figurings and how none of her stuff seems mannered, but it's all easy and natural and bright. Buy the book, friend.
Rating: 
Summary: Good at times, but inconsistent.
Review: Some of the stories in this book are really good, but others just aren't. Having read and been totally blown away by two of Amy Hempel's other short story collections, I found this a little bit disappointing. Stories are interesting enough, and pleasant enough to read but seem more generic than some of her earlier work. I felt like I could have read them and not recognized tht they were the work of this great author. Most disappointing of all was the novella. Long and rambling and if there was a point I didn't get it. For better books by Amy Hempel, I strongly suggest both Reasons To Live and At The Gates Of The Animal Kingdom.
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Summary: A first read for Hempel
Review: This book is full of descriptive short stories. This caused it to be a hard to read book. With all the descriptive detail it forced you to slow down and digest what you were reading. I am at the point where I don't if I should move on or try another. I am left wanting more after every story though and you end up with more than you bargain for with the short stories. The novella seemed to repeat some details from the short stories so I would get confused and start thinking about the last story. All in all, it was a short and decent read.
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