Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories

Written by Megan Mayhew Bergman

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

An “astonishing debut collection, by a writer reminiscent of such greats as Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and even Chekhov” (Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants), focusing on women navigating relationships with humans, animals, and the natural world.

Exploring the way our choices and relationships are shaped by the menace and beauty of the natural world, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s powerful and heartwarming collection captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love or fear collides with good sense, or when our attachment to an animal or wild place can’t be denied.

In “Housewifely Arts,” a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African gray parrot that can mimic her deceased mother’s voice. A population-control activist faces the conflict between her loyalty to the environment and her maternal desire in “Yesterday’s Whales.” And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker.

As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us. This extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of remarkable talent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781442357921

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes of The Best American Short Stories and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. She teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives on a small farm in Vermont.

Reviews for Birds of a Lesser Paradise

[amanaceerdh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

loved all of these stories. most include animals and take place in the south. can't wait to see more from this author.

[nancyjean19 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Each story is based around the relationship a character has with animals. I think if I hadn't read the author's bio, where she admits to being married to a vet, the stories would have felt more interesting to me. The way it was, it sometimes seemed like the author was just using terms of art she gleaned from her family without taking the story much farther. Other stories, though, were more engaging and unique. I think her style would lend itself well to a novel, where she could take an idea and run with it rather than re-using the same ideas and themes in short stories.

[lmjenkins · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderful read. I wanted each story to be its own novel. The characters were very compelling and I loved the touch of nature and womanhood that ran through each story. I will eagerly await its arrival in my bookstore and promote it endlessly to those looking for a memorable reading experience.

[klburnside · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Birds of a Lesser Paradise is a collection of short stories. As I say with every collection of short stories I read, some were better than others. The first several stories I read actually had me in tears. The author touched on some very real emotions and addressed the complicated nature of human relationships excellently. I was so excited for the rest of the stories. As I continued to read, I didn’t relate to the stories quite so much. Too many of the stories in the collection are somehow related to animals, and not being an animal lover, I found it hard to get really interested.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some books make me hate the rating system and how subjective reviews can be. I go with my gut instinct, then begin to second guess it. Birds of a Lesser Paradise is one of these books because it is wonderful. Some really amazing and nearly perfect stories are included. The only problem with this collection is that it is unbalanced. Open up the book, start reading on page one, and you'll find amazing story after amazing story. The characters are quirky and interesting. The stories are thought-provoking and stirring. The language is so incredibly tender and vivid. And Bergman's balance of structure, her use of animals, her dissection of relationships—it's all ingenious. Once you've hit the halfway mark, the stories start to fall off a little. Now, these stories in the second half are still really good, but the bar has already been set too damn high. Maybe if these weaker stories had been sprinkled throughout the collection, they wouldn't have stood out as much. So do I rate the collection when it's at its best? If I did so, Birds of a Lesser Paradise would be an easy five stars. But my instinct is to judge the collection as a whole. And in that case, I cannot go higher than a four. But that's a highly-recommended four. Any author who can churn out the stories Bergman does in the first half of this book is certainly worth your time. Expect to see the author's new collection of stories, Almost Famous Women, on my currently-reading shelf soon.

[msf59 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“I am the shepherd of a strange flock.”“I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships.”I am still trying to get my mind around the fact that this is a debut collection. Bergman has such a strong and assured voice, out maneuvering more seasoned writers. Yes, animals play a part in each of these stories, sometimes in a minor role and other times front and center and always garnered with reverence and adoration.The opening story, features a single mother and her young son making a long journey to track down an African Gray Parrot that can imitate her deceased mother’s voice. Another story is about a lovely veterinarian, disfigured by a hybrid wolf, after a botched surgery. A group of lonely souls search a swamp for the elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker and discover more about their own isolated lives. This is just a sample but rest easy, each of these wonderful, sometimes bittersweet tales, are perfectly written and perfectly realized. I can not praise it high enough. Seek this collection out now!

[lisapeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I like to think I bring at least a somewhat cool head to the reviews I write. Which is not to say I’m not subjective—I can love something or hate it or, more often, find faults and virtues scattered throughout. But I don’t tend to get emotional over it. It’s a book, crafted by a human hand with varying degrees of artfulness, and my job here is to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t, and what may or may not work for the next reader on any given day.But once in a while a book comes along that just throws me for a loop, and I’m delighted to say that Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise is one of them. Not because it makes writing the review any easier—it doesn’t—but because I’m just so glad I got to read it.While this isn’t a collection of linked short stories, there are themes that repeat just enough to make them cohere and echo off each other. It’s a cumulative reading experience, where each discrete piece reveals itself to riff off the others. And while my response to this is, obviously, deeply personal, I also imagine I’m not the only one who feels shot right through the heart by Mayhew Bergman’s subjects: Being a mother. Having a mother. Slowly losing a parent to dementia. Loving animals a bit unreasonably. The tug of wanting to rescue all the hurt ones. And the awful guilt of feeling like you’ve failed a good dog. (Nearly seven years—OK, six years and 355 days—after losing a really good dog of my own, to this day unsure whether I could have saved him if I’d done something differently, I still have to cry every time I think of him.) And this, this is is the big one: That love can be, and is, often irrational. And we all have to live with that.In the lead tale, “Housewifely Arts,” which first entranced me in One Story, that irrationality is the narrator’s nine-hour road trip with her small son to find Carnie, an African gray parrot whom she despises but who can speak in her dead mother’s voice. That irrationality is the title story’s heroine, who plunges into the woods with her elderly, deceptively fragile father and a handsome paying tourist in search of the quite likely extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. In “Another Story She Won’t Believe” it is the woman “sober going on forty-six days,” making her way through a blizzard to the Lemur Center where she volunteers, to warm a rescued aye-aye named, god help us all, Faye Done Away. Or the narrator in “Every Vein a Tooth,” finding herself caught between her live-in boyfriend and a menagerie of rescued animals:"Three golden retrievers in various states of decline—Salli with her missing ear and lumps of scar tissue, paralyzed Prince dragging his cart down the hallway, toothless and epileptic Sam dreaming wild on the kitchen floor. Or, it might have been the declawed raccoon marauding in the living room. The one-eyed chinchilla nesting in cedar chips in what could have been the nursery. I didn’t count the feral cats—they lived underneath the sofa, largely out of sight."What could have been the nursery—but Mayhew Bergman’s protagonists aren’t lost and desperate childless women clinging to animals in order to fill the spaces in empty wombs and empty beds. They just realize that love, in whatever form it presents itself, is not something to be turned away. They aren’t caricatures; they’re a little raw around the edges, but who can blame them? The men here mostly feel a bit temporary, with short, elemental names: Smith, Gray, Wood, Mac. But the animals, the parents, the children throb faithfully with love given and returned; it’s not so much about whose side I’m supposed to be on here, but whose side I’m allowed to be on when all is said and done. The narrator of “The Urban Coop” runs her easygoing husband’s city farm plot, cares for the homeless who volunteer there, wishes for a baby of her own, and reverberates with guilt over her dog, “loyal to the point of self-destruction,” who desperately swims a mile out to sea when they leave him unattended on their boat one evening. He is picked up by a fishing boat and returned, but afterward she can’t quite let him out of her sight: “Stay with me, I said to him, and I will make it up to you. Again and again.”If I were to say: There but for whatever gods of compatibility go I, with our mismatched gallery of adopted stray cats and a dog who sleeps in the bed, I know plenty of people who would nod their heads. And they should all read Birds of a Lesser Paradise. Being a mother. Having a mother. “Yesterday’s Whales” finds its main character pregnant, conflicted, running home to her own mother, and this, ultimately, is the one that made me weep in public:"Mothers, I believe, intoxicate us. We idolize them and take them for granted. We hate them and blame them and exalt them more thoroughly than anyone else in our lives. We sift through the evidence of their love, reassure ourselves of their affection and its biological genesis. We can steal and lie and leave and they will love us."These are wonderful, well-written, heartfelt stories; Megan Mayhew Bergman has put together a beautifully coherent and sweet book. I myself had to double check the dedication page to make sure they weren’t written just for me. But don’t let that stop you—they’re for all of us stray creatures who need a little love and rescuing.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each and every story heartbreaking and beautiful. Truly illustrates the ugliness, the beauty, the fragility and toughness of being alive in the world. I checked this out from the library but will buy my own copy as I know I'll want to re-read this in a few years.

[writestuff_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not everyone could live with tumbleweeds of dog hair on the steps, the night sounds of feral cats exploring the house, the raccoon rattling his cage door at two in the morning. The retrievers came to me, stuck their cold noses on my cheek. Aged and humbled, they looked like orangutans, their cinnamon-and-honey-colored coats matted, their eyes framed in white. When Gray left, the cats came out of hiding long enough for me to name them. – from Every Vein a Tooth, page 168 -Megan Mayhew Bergman’s amazing debut collection of short stories captured me first with its alluring book jacket, and then delighted me with its honest, funny and poignant narratives. The collection includes twelve stories which intertwine the characters’ lives with that of pets, wild animals, and the natural world. An animal lover for my entire life, I saw myself in some of the characters who find comfort in their connection with the furred and feathered beings in their lives, and find that animals have valuable lessons to teach. These characters see their lives firmly enmeshed in the natural world around them, sometimes with a surprising twist or unexpected outcome.In Housewifely Arts, a woman mourns the death of her mother and decides to take a road trip with her young son to find her mother’s pet bird – a bird who could remarkably imitate her mother’s voice. The story reveals the ambivalent feelings between mother and daughter, and the bittersweet ache of wanting something that is unattainable.I haven’t told Ike that we’re driving to a small roadside zoo outside of Myrtle Beach so that I can hear my mother’s voice call from the beak of a thirty-six-year-old African gray parrot, a bird I hated, a bird that could beep like a microwave, ring like a phone, and sneeze just like me. – from Housewifely Arts, page 3 -Most of Bergman’s stories have a common theme – that of the sometimes uneasy relationship between parents and children, and the longing for unconditional love. In The Cow That Milked Herself, a pregnant woman longs for her vet tech husband, Wood, to turn his caring from the animals he treats to her. In the animal world, sheep drop their lambs on mud covered floors, dogs fall ill with bladder infections, and jaguars in captivity are known to devour their own cubs – it is rough and sometimes sad, and scary…and there is something there which reminds us of the tenuous threads which bind one life to another.The title story, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, and the last story, The Artificial Heart, take a look at the relationship between daughters and fathers. In both stories, the fathers are aged and their health is declining. The daughters are the caregivers, strong women whose hearts are aching with memories of who their fathers used to be. In Birds of a Lesser Paradise, a theme park which runs birding trips becomes the backdrop for the spooling out of a story about the harsh reality of growing older; in The Artificial Heart, the story takes place many years in the future as the earth’s oceans have become poisoned. The protagonist’s father in this last narrative has dementia and has a newly minted relationship with an older woman whose diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease is robbing her of memory. Bergman skillfully weaves humor into a story about loss.My father was ninety-one and senile but insisted he could still look for love. The dating service paired him with Susan – an octogenarian feminist who listed skee ball and container gardening as her primary hobbies. She was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and chewed nicotine gum when she talked. They’d been dating a month and when he was lucid, Dad was smitten. – from The Artificial Heart, page 185 -Bergman also reminds us that nature can be a dangerous and fearful thing, full of the unexpected and mysterious. In Saving Face, a young veterinarian’s momentary lapse while removing porcupine quills from a wolf hybrid, results in her life being forever changed.She’d treated the dog with tenderness. What did I expect in return? she wondered. Gratitude?There are no promises, no obligations between living things, she thought. Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe. – from Saving Face, page 70 -Likewise, in Night Hunting, a teenager is terrified when her mother’s cancer returns. The two of them have moved to Vermont and listen to the coyotes at night. One particular coyote, a female with pups, is becoming more confident and dangerous. She represents the relentlessness of nature, the grim reality of the perils we face in our lives.The best predators, I realized, had no sympathy. – from Night Hunting, page 156 -Taken as a whole, Bergman’s collection of stories is a stunning and beautifully wrought meditation on how our lives are connected to each other and to the world around us. Bergman writes with a finely honed knowledge of the animal world, and includes the humor, the menace, the poignancy, and the love which draw people to animals. She reminds us of how we cannot detach ourselves from our biology or from the world in which we live.This is an exquisite collection from a fresh, new voice in fiction.Highly recommended.

[dawnlovesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

loved all of these stories. most include animals and take place in the south. can't wait to see more from this author.

[her_royal_orangeness · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What I find most remarkable about the stories in “Birds of a Lesser Paradise” is how memorable they are. That, for me, is the hallmark of a very well-written short story. With each story, Bergman creates scenes and characters that are so vivid you feel that you’ve been immersed in a novel of several hundred pages. The themes running through the stories are nature and femininity, and the author explores complex moral issues in a way that is both quiet and thought-provoking. I was surprised and delighted by how much I adored this collection of stories; Bergman is definitely an author to watch.