Photo taken by: Ken Browar

 

“A quiet, tenderly empathetic collection…what’s different in Mr. Van Booy’s beautifully written stories is that there is no bitterness even though there is so much pain…”--East Hampton Star

__________________________________________

ONE worries, after reading a debut short-story collection this breathtaking, what Simon Van Booy could possibly do for an encore. Write something longer? Take up haiku? Wander the world like a sadhu for a few decades and send us another book as chillingly beautiful, like postcards from Eden?

Maybe it's the pain of love, of loving kindness, that shoots through these brief stories and fixes them in a reader's memory. In "Little Birds," a 15-year-old orphan raised by Michel, an ex-prisoner who found him in a train car, has known nothing but love all his life despite his unlikely guardian. ("What happens on the Pigalle, stays on the Pigalle," Michel tells the boy, of his night life.) In "Where They Hide Is a Mystery," little Edgar's beloved mother has just died.

His father slides into silence. Disconsolate, Edgar wanders into a park and meets a man who explains the impermanence and permeability of death. " 'My own wife,' the man said with a mouthful of orange, 'is the blend of light in late summer that pushed through the smoky trees to the soft fists of wind fallen apples.

Would you like some orange?' " They go to Edgar's mother's favorite Chinese restaurant and visit places he and his mother went together. In an evening, the man transforms Edgar's sorrow into something less lonely. City streets in Paris and New York, couples in love, park benches are backdrops. Van Booy's stories are somehow like paintings the characters walk out of, and keep walking. - Los Angeles Times:

__________________________________________

"His sentences are spare, subtle and freighted, his images fresh...you see and feel his settings…a first-rate storyteller." --NEWSDAY

__________________________________________

"Lovely and genuinely touching....Van Booy's clean, simple, delicate prose suits the material's sadness....for all their sombreness, these stories exude an abiding sweetness.... These characters cling to optimism, even to love,  despite their frailties and straitened circumstances....This talented author bears watching."  --Kirkus

__________________________________________

"These stories have at once the solemnity of myth and the offhandedness of happenstance." --Publishers Weekly

__________________________________________

"Resilient characters often emerge from bleak circumstances with an unexpected and completely engaging optimism in the strongest ones [stories] he [Van Booy] shows an uncanny ability to create intense moods and emotions within the space of a few poetic paragraphs." --Booklist, American Library Association

__________________________________________

"Simon Van Booy's stories have the power and resonance
of poems. They stay with you like a significant
memory."--Roger Rosenblatt

__________________________________________

"Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch,
smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence,
are frozen for a moment in these stories and
celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection in
alll aspects of love."--Fred Volkmer

__________________________________________

Simon Van Booy's prose is as economical as it is
powerful.  His characters are so real - and their
stories so poignant - that I yearned to reach out and
assure them of my understanding."--Caroline Upcher

"Abandonnez votre famille, vos enfants et vos amis;
démissionnez de votre travail et de vos engagements
bénévoles; laissez brûler votre dîner dans le four ...
et plongez vous dans ce livre.  La vie réelle sent le
plastique à côté des mots de Simon Van Booy."--Martin Page

__________________________________________