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Rating: 
Summary: Real
Review: After reading Harty's "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down" from Best American Short Stories, I had to get his collection, "Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona." I'm glad I did. He writes amazingly real characters and puts them in amazingly real moments. One of his recurring themes seems to hauntingly deal with nostalgia. How do we let it, and how should we let it affect our present reality? If you like Raymond Carver, I think you'll appreciate this collection. It's beautiful, fairly spare writing, that, like Carver, leaves much in the hands of the reader. Enjoy the sadness.
Rating: 
Summary: Moving Fiction
Review: I got an advance copy of Ryan Harty's forthcoming collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona and was blown away by the stories. The pieces in this collection hail from the other side of the emotional train tracks, a place where chaparral and saguaros fill the lots where homes and families should be. With subtlety and control, Harty makes arroyos run with missed opportunity and sunsets burn red with loneliness. Yet these stories are far from empty-through them cruise rock stars, Kachina gods and a robotic boy who's more real than real. In one story, a friend wads up another's wedding vows, while elsewhere, a brother sends his dead sister's cats scurrying into the Vegas night. Harty knows the way young lovers stumble toward one another, and he knows the phantom pains of separation. As one character points out in "Between Tubac and Tumcacori," "At a certain point in your life country music is all you want to hear." While the eight stories in Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona lack the twang and swagger of a western tune, they contain the same essential tales of love and loss, and they stick in your head just as long, rolling around for days and days.
Rating: 
Summary: Tapping into the sadness
Review: I usually find collections of short stories hard to wade through, but this collection from Ryan Harty was just the opposite. We all have sadness in our lives, be it small or huge. Most of us have learned to laugh an ironic laugh and not talk about it. But Harty sure can write about it. He taps into the sadness in his characters in a way that is unique to my experience, and he does this in a way that made me feel better about my own little sadnesses. His characters are just so "real", they jump off the page fully drawn after just a few paragraphs. And Harty writes with a quiet calmness (the matter of factness of the characters concerning their situations helps you like them) that is marvelous.The book is not perfect, there are small things here and there that show he isn't a seasoned pro, but I wager you won't find a book better at what it is good at this year. Enough gushing. Buy this book if you like good writing.
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Collection of Stories
Review: This is one of the best story collections I've read in years. Every story is strong, all the characters are incredibly real, and there's an overall sense of sadness that knocks you on(...). Not that the stories are depressing, per se. In fact, they can be hilarious at times, and there's almost always a feeling of hope at the end. I came across "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down" in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2003,and while I love that story (it's about a family with a robot boy), there are others here that I like even better. "Crossroads" and "September are my favorites. An amazing book. I look forward to whatever Harty writes next.
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Collection of Stories
Review: This is one of the best story collections I've read in years. Every story is strong, all the characters are incredibly real, and there's an overall sense of sadness that knocks you on(...). Not that the stories are depressing, per se. In fact, they can be hilarious at times, and there's almost always a feeling of hope at the end. I came across "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down" in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2003,and while I love that story (it's about a family with a robot boy), there are others here that I like even better. "Crossroads" and "September are my favorites. An amazing book. I look forward to whatever Harty writes next.
Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous book
Review: While I was reading this book, I couldn't wait to get home from work so I could fall back into the stories. Now I'm walking around with the characters in my head, like old friends. It's a beautiful book, the kind you want to recommend to everyone you know. Ryan Harty is a wonderful writer.
Rating:
Summary: A gorgeous book
Review: While I was reading this book, I couldn't wait to get home from work so I could fall back into the stories. Now I'm walking around with the characters in my head, like old friends. It's a beautiful book, the kind you want to recommend to everyone you know. Ryan Harty is a wonderful writer.
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