Sing to It

by Amy Hempel Narrated by Amy Hempel

Overview

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD

ONE OF TIME'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019

From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: an astounding collection of fifteen stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal).

Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is beloved and highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction.

These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband's affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel's singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is an “exquisite collection” (The Wall Street Journal) and a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

In this long-awaited collection of short stories—Hempel's last title was published more than a decade ago—there is a gorgeous matter-of-factness to her narration, a graceful simplicity that creates an almost hypnotic pattern among these distinct stories. Whether characters are pondering animal or human relationships, conflicts or resolutions, gains or (more often) losses, each story has its own sense of stillness, which Hempel's voice respects and quietly celebrates. In fact, Hempel's words and voice join forces to give the listener permission to feel life differently, more intensely—to be aware and appreciative of whatever life gives, knowing that it goes on regardless of our expectations or desires. Her thoughtful stories and gentle delivery make SING TO IT well worth the wait. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Each purified sentence [in Sing to It] is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma. . . . Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue. It’s astonishing how little she needs to get something up and going on the page. A pun, a malapropism, or a ghost rhyme is spark enough.”
–James Wood, The New Yorker

“Turning the pages [in Sing to It] is like swimming in a lake and suddenly finding the bottom drop out beneath you, leaving you to get your bearings amid unanticipated depths.”
–Ruth Franklin, The Atlantic

“It's astonishing that Hempel can pack so much emotion into so few words. . . . There's not a story in Sing to It that's less than brilliant, and the collection itself is even greater than the sum of its parts. Hempel occasionally draws comparisons to authors like Mary Robison and Joy Williams, but she writes like nobody else — she's an irreplaceable literary treasure who has mastered the art of the short story more skillfully than just about any other writer out there. Sing to It is a quiet masterpiece by a true American original.”
–NPR Books

“[Amy Hempel is] an essential voice in contemporary American short fiction... [Sing to It] offers Hempel at her best: oscillating between hilarity and pain in a way that feels utterly human.”
–TIME Magazine

“Scintillating as the blade of a knife. . . . The verisimilar quality of this storytelling is powerful. Ms. Hempel’s stories compel us to re-reading in much the same way we review (or re-read) interactions in everyday life, attempting to piece together what really happened, what was actually being said. . . . When there is a shock, a crisis, a scene of horror, Ms. Hempel sings to it, and the result is an exquisite collection by a master of the genre.”
–The Wall Street Journal


"Gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic tales...Hempel is a master miniaturist, capturing in exquisitely nuanced sentences the sensuous, cerebral, and spiritual cascade of existence, homing in on pain and humor and the wisdom each can engender."
—Booklist

"Short story virtuoso Hempel's first collection since 2006 consists of 15 characteristically bold, disconcerting, knockout stories that highlight her signature style with its condensed prose, quirky narrators, and touching, disturbing, transcendent moments."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A dizzying array of short fiction...Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss. The brilliance of the writing resides in the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her narrator's reticence, teaching us to read between the lines."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)



“[Hempel’s] stories . . . burrow inside you, dogging your thoughts for days. . . . Hempel has both a better feel for the vicissitudes of the world and a better imagination than you do.”
–Cory Oldweiler, amNY


“Attention short story fans: Amy Hempel is back with her first collection of short stories in over a decade. Some are just a page long and others are like small novellas, but they’re all astonishingly rhythmic and textured.”
–Hello Giggles


“Hempel packs a great deal into the briefest of fictions, creating balanced and nuanced stories
of longing, love and loss.”
—Bookpage

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

In this long-awaited collection of short stories—Hempel's last title was published more than a decade ago—there is a gorgeous matter-of-factness to her narration, a graceful simplicity that creates an almost hypnotic pattern among these distinct stories. Whether characters are pondering animal or human relationships, conflicts or resolutions, gains or (more often) losses, each story has its own sense of stillness, which Hempel's voice respects and quietly celebrates. In fact, Hempel's words and voice join forces to give the listener permission to feel life differently, more intensely—to be aware and appreciative of whatever life gives, knowing that it goes on regardless of our expectations or desires. Her thoughtful stories and gentle delivery make SING TO IT well worth the wait. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-01-16

The first collection in more than a decade from Hempel offers a dizzying array of short fiction held together by the unmistakable textures of her voice.

Hempel is often called a minimalist, and that aesthetic is very much in evidence here. Of the 15 stories, 10 are two pages or shorter in length, but if you think this means they're slight, you'll want to think again. Rather, Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss. "At the end, he said, No metaphors!" she writes in the title story. "…So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. My arms the trees." The effect is to articulate an idea and then to illustrate it simultaneously. "That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over," she opens "The Quiet Car," reminding us that all stories begin in the middle, with the characters' lives already underway. And yet, for all the succinct deftness of these shorter pieces, it is in the collection's longer entries that Hempel's vision takes full shape. The remarkable "A Full-Service Shelter," inspired by her longtime animal advocacy, uses a repeating structure—each paragraph begins with a variation of the phrase "They knew us as the ones"—to draw us into the futility and necessity of caring for dogs who have been abandoned, a tension that animates the narrative. "Greed" traces a wife's simmering vengeance against the older woman who is sleeping with her husband; the interloper is appropriately named "Mrs. Greed." Then, there's Cloudland, a novella that fills much of the second half of the book, the saga of a disgraced private school teacher doing home-care work in Florida who gave up for adoption the child she bore at 18. Constructed as a collection of fragments, the narrative circles itself, moving back and forth in time and often leaving the most important details unshared. The brilliance of the writing, however, resides in the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her narrator's reticence, teaching us to read between the lines. "I remember thinking," she writes: "There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong."

Hempel's great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally reckon with themselves.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170457328
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Sing to It
At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one.

He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another.

At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.

Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.

So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him.

My arms the trees.

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