Lia Tam Tam من عند Rel, Gujarat 393120، الهند من عند Rel, Gujarat 393120، الهند

A must-read for all New Yorkers.

Kevin Canty gives the his admissions of humanity in A Stranger in This World. This a book of 10 individual short stories. Each story contains different characters and different events, while maintaining an overall theme of strife and personal reflection. The stories contain drug addicts, alcoholics, sexual desires, and everything dirty in the world. He contradicts this with human emotions, compassion, and beauty. There is blunt honesty oozing through the pages. Usually his main characters are those caught in the middle. They are the sons of alcoholics and runaway parents, girlfriends caught in life or death situations, youth on the brink of adulthood trying to make the grown-up decisions, middle-aged attempting to peace together broken lives, and a dog killer. They all face traumatic events, circumstances that would leave a person to choose a path. Some characters are faced with a fork in the road, they can either choose to keep on in the way they were, in sadness, behind bars, or free themselves of burden and responsibility. Most are just honest people trying to understand the world and deal with the problematic lives they’ve been thrown into (humanity). The book begins with, “King of Elephants,” about a teenager, Raymond, with two alcoholic parents. In a story where the roles of parent and child have been reversed, Raymond is burdened with the volatility of his unpredictable and irresponsible parents. As he explains his mother, “we passed her around like the black queen in a game of hearts, the cops to the hospital, the hospital to my father, my father to me. I was the one who could not pass her on.” He dreams of a life far away and without them. “The Victim,” centers around a teenage girl, her insecurities and her half-caring boyfriend. When she’s put in a life or death situation and finds out a little more about herself. In these stories you get to feel what the main character feels. “Junk,” is a story about a middle-aged man, who is trying to live a less chaotic life now. With a new, strait-edge, girl with less dramatic hobbies. He’s turning a new leaf when the past catches up with him. Canty takes you on a wild ride, drinking, doing drugs, high speed chases avoiding gun wielding bikers, pistol toting drunks, car accidents. Each story is perfectly crafted with specific details sparking your five senses. The language pulls you into the story world with images of mountain tops, the smell of waxy band-aids, the feeling of a breath on the back of your neck. You are in the car with a blind man behind the wheel. You are standing in a tipped over mobile home, grabbing beers out of a refrigerator on its side. You are in the kennel, feeling the insanity of constant barking. You are in a dark room, unaware of your surroundings. Canty paints the picture, surrounds us with the story, its inhabitants, its dangers, and its kindness. The language is brutally honest. Some stories are told in first person and some in third person, but all are so detail oriented and well crafted that you believe you’re reading non-fiction, actual accounts. His stories are fiction, but they become real and somewhat personal.

Another excellent novel from Abercrombie, set in the same universe as his First Law trilogy and very similar in style and tone to those books. That would be my only criticism: that his work is starting to feel a bit repetitive. It’s such good stuff, though, that I can hardly object. This tells the story of a three-day battle between the Union and the Northmen. There are several familiar faces but the point-of-view characters are mostly new, with the exception of Bremer dan Gorst, who’s one of the most compelling. The characterizations are what I enjoy most about Abercrombie’s work, but I continue to be impressed by the vivid battle scenes. I particularly liked a couple of isolated sequences where the point of view jumps from a soldier who’s just been killed to the one who struck the fatal blow, and then to the man who strikes him down in turn, and so on. Abercrombie carries on with his cynical, nearly fatalistic themes. The book’s title can refer to a circle of standing stones called The Heroes, but there is much discussion of the nature of heroes in general and of the pointlessness and inevitability of war. While I can easily keep the characters straight in each book, I’m beginning to have trouble keeping track of all the Named Men over the whole series. I remember that the Bloody-Nine thought you had to be realistic; that Shivers was trying to be a better man; and now Craw wants to do the right thing. But the Dogman and Black Dow and some of the others are starting to run together. In this book I admit to being disappointed in Finree, the soldier’s wife who is described as “venomously ambitious”, but I'm not so sure about the “venomously” part. Her thought processes didn’t seem to sync with her actions, and I didn’t find her a believable character. Overall I liked this more than Best Served Cold, and I look forward to his new book: Red Country, which is supposed to be written in the style of a Western.