More praise for All Things, All at Once and Lee K. Abbott

“Abbott is the rare writer who doesn’t feel a need to gentle readers into accepting his narrative idiosyncrasies. Instead, he plunges right in. . . . From the very start, we’re engaged by the entertainment and vitality of Abbott’s prose, by its local color. Then, right in the middle of a typically eccentric and loose-limbed story, he often grabs us with a moment that becomes sharply moving—and then almost unbearably so. . . . Despite all the loquacious banter in this impressive collection, the most important moments turn out to be the ones in which, even briefly, words aren’t enough.”

—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book Review

“Picking up one of Mr. Abbott’s stories is like stepping into a rushing stream. Before you know it, you’ve been thrown up on the bank in a place you never anticipated, because you, like his characters, felt you knew what was happening, and that you had control. In his stories, no one ever does, not really.”

—Anne Morris, Dallas Morning News

“A writer’s writer, Abbott has honed his craft to a glinty, dangerous sharpness. . . . All Things, All at Once is a powerful mix of 25 tales full of bittersweet emotion and the low-level suffering that comes from not having or not knowing what you most need. Abbott’s stories are the stuff of everyday life wrought crisply and with clarity as visual as it is visceral. . . . [Abbott writes] in a style both off-handed and go-for-the-jugular bloody. . . . There are no so-so stories in All Things, All at Once; each piece resonates its own complex chords of loss, suffering, betrayal, redemption. . . . These stories capture the language, color and incestuousness of small-town desert life with brutal, flinty clarity.”

—Victoria A. Brownworth, Baltimore Sun

“Abbott is a fine writer, who, like Cheever, seeks out the sublime on the back nine, where the mundane real estate of the suburbs turns into something magical and cosmic. But something wilder lurks in his pages, even less mainstream than Cheever. . . . Few writers show us the interior life of the man stumbling away—poised between that ‘enchanted province of paradise and dread’ that is the future—quite so honestly as Abbott does here.”

—John Freeman, Sunday Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News

“Complex character is the core of Abbott’s stories, but it is the voice that carries you irresistibly along; it is a rhythm, a riff, a rap that makes you smile at least every two pages with recognition or reconciliation, or both. . . . Like Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus and Alice Munro, who remained faithful to the powerful but neglected form, he is a master of its particular poetic demands.”

—Charles E. May, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“The interesting aspect of these 25 Southwestern-based stories by Abbott (The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting) is the range of themes he fits into each story. . . . Abbott brilliantly manipulates the narrative. . . . Highly recommended.”

—Joshua Cohen, Library Journal

“All Things, All at Once is rightly titled. It’s a florid and rich cornucopia of stories, full of exuberance, passion, gravity, consolation, and utter zaniness. It is a rare collection and puts Abbott’s great versatility and masterful narrative skills on vivid display.”

—Richard Ford

“Lee Abbott’s stories are fiction of the age—of a time and place so palpably real you feel you can step into it—funny, grave, written with wit and high lyricism, and dialogue so rich and real that lives move at high speed, swiftly defined, always heading toward the far edge of reality, or just beyond. This is fiction in the mode of John Cheever, written for the long run, marking out those days when all you love hovers right there—maybe forever, or maybe it’s about to disappear. Lee Abbott is one terrific writer.”

—William Kennedy

“Lee K. Abbott is a true American original, the owner of an unmistakable voice—at once funny, wise, loopy, and utterly unique. Abbott is one of our finest short story writers, and the arrival of this long-awaited volume of his collected stories is cause for celebration.”

—Tom Perrotta

“Lee Abbot’s is a unique voice. You think he’s writing, say, about a boozy golf player who mismanages his love life. But you soon enough realize that you are enthralled in a dark descent into the very essence of what it means to be an American and in despair. There is often a glimmer of light in his stories, and Abbott’s absolutely individual voice broadens that glimmer to a gleam as his characters work at finding a way to live. His sense of shape, and the voice that drives his narrative, are the achievements of a master of the form.”

—Frederick Busch

“What a magnificent and necessary collection. I think, if God in his heaven decides to do it all again, he ought to read this one. What he got right. What he got wrong. The glorious imperfections of his little perfections. We strange beings of the human variety. He might just change his mind and move to earth, buy him a truck and get a real nice girl because there is truly life down here and joy and sadness attend and no one can do better or worse or bear the burden more than we do for ourselves. Lee K. Abbott’s All Things, All at Once is a splendid triumph—salutary, edifying, radiant.”

—Robert Olmstead