Things that Fall from the Sky

By Kevin Brockmeier

Weaving together loss and anxiety with fantastic elements and literary sleight-of-hand, Kevin Brockmeier’s richly imagined Things That Fall from the Sky views the nagging realities of the world through a hopeful lens.

In the deftly told “These Hands,” a man named Lewis recounts his time babysitting a young girl and his inconsolable sense of loss after she is wrenched away. In “Apples,” a boy comes to terms with the complex world of adults, his first pangs of love, and the bizarre death of his Bible coach. “The Jesus Stories” examines a people trying to accelerate the Second Coming by telling the story of Christ in every possible way. And in the O. Henry Award winning “The Ceiling,” a man’s marriage begins to disintegrate after the sky starts slowly descending.

Achingly beautiful and deceptively simple, Things That Fall from the Sky defies gravity as one of the most original story collections seen in recent years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9780307429728

Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of five novels for adults and two children's novels. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, among other publications. He has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.

Reviews for Things that Fall from the Sky

[porch_reader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved Kevin Brockmeier's novel, The Brief History of the Dead when I read it a couple of years ago. The writing was so descriptive that I felt cold when I read the descriptions of Antarctica. The storyline itself, about the afterlife, was fascinating and well-developed. I knew that I wanted to read more by Brockmeier.For me, Things that Fall from the Sky, an earlier collection of Brockmeier's short stories, didn't quite match the elegance and depth of The Brief History of the Dead. However, Brockmeier's precisely descriptive writing continues to shine through. Consider these first two lines of "Apples": "The fall of my thirteenth year was a time when all the important events in my life seemed to cluster together like bees. On the same sun-bright afternoon that I won the school spelling bee, my parents sat across from me in the living room and told me that they no longer loved each other, and a great gray ocean of wishlessness filled our house."So much about the narrator is revealed in those two sentences. I would have read this collection for no other reason than to enjoy Brockmeier's writing.But the storytelling itself is also top-notch in many of these stories. The storylines are unusual, creative, surprising. Brockmeier pulls in elements of fairy tales in some (like "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin," a story whose whimsy is evident from just the title). In others, he describes situations that are utterly original. For example, "The Passenger" describes an entire society on an airplane. Each of the 11 stories is unique, demonstrating Brockmeier's range. After reading The Brief History of the Dead, I was in awe of Brockmeier's writing. Things that Fall from the Sky shows that Brockmeier is as talented at writing short stories as he is at novels.