The Country of Marriage

Rating:
Summary: Great Storyline. Makes you think twice.
Review: Ever since reading "Days with Cecilia" in Harper's , I have looked for stories by Anthony Giardina everywhere. The Country of Marriage has fulfilled my need for stories that are written as I think - but in an elegant and beautiful country of words. The truth in these stories, written without regard for sniveling needs for ostentations or pretensions, is a fine breath of air after all the smoggy stuff now available. These are stories about the human spirit and ALL relationships and likely to appeal to anyone with sensitivity.

Rating:
Summary: Meditation
Review: I was trying to figure out why I liked this book so much because subject matter and other things were so bourgeois and a little pretentious - poets and professional type people drinking wine, listening to Jazz, going to therapy, driving semi yuppie cars, reading classics and watching foreign flicks. Despite all of that, it occurred to me, on my third or fourth reading of the first story, "I live in Yonville," that Giardina transcends. Without committing the sin of profundity, he reaches so deep (especially the first story, which, in my opinion, outshines the run of the mill contemp. lit. found in magazines and journals today and even the stories in this collection). He's got IT, as a writer. Reading Gardina is like getting high. He santifies those precious things we merely feel, on that touch and go level, though, we know it to be worth so much more.

Rating:
Summary: Great Storyline. Makes you think twice.
Review: The Country of Marriage was great. It had a good beginning middle and end

Rating:
Summary: Men with souls
Review: There are at most a handful of male writers whose honest portrayals of male psyches ring true, and Giardina is certainly one of them. What's special about these stories is that men reveal their lives with women and children as the measure of themselves. And though the stories revolve around one theme, the voices vary; there is a scarily ruthless loser; a couple of men looking back on adolescence; but best, men talking themselves toward deeper commitment. If I didn't have a wonderful husband, I'd be jealous of this writer's wife!

Rating:
Summary: Anthony Giardina is amazing
Review: There are only two writers whose work I have read and have truly been amazed that the way they write is the way people think: Grace Paley and Anthony Giardina. He knows the ways men and women act towards one another and makes some of the best art anyone would ever want to read. Plain and simple.