Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down

For any lover of short stories, this is a must. These are so imaginative and filled with so much detail that they come to life as you're reading, especially to a creative mind like my own. I usually like short stories because I can have one or two and then come back for a few more. But these are so great that it made the book impossible to put down! I hope for more books from Anna Dickson James because her work can, without question, stand right up there with the likes of Raymond Carver, Albert Camus, and the like. Again I say, fantastic!

This collection of short stories is a combination of speculative fiction and realism in which the elements of fabulism are woven so tightly into the realism of life, they feel like a world we could climb into or out of. And by comparison, the real world is pushed so far to its extreme that it feels fabulist, magical, both dark and beautiful, frightening and erotic. These are stories of desire - the things we desire and the way those impulses bubble up from places we don't understand; the things we are told we should desire by our family and culture and all the influences constantly bombarding us; and finally, the things we desire but cannot attain because of our own limitations, be they body or mental. What's particularly striking is Dickson Jame's scalpel blade upon the experience of female bodies, excising their experiences one deft stroke at a time, revealing all the ways women desire and are denied or neglected or rejected or told their desires are unimportant, negligible. And each story is richly told with language that is nothing less than deeply, vividly sensual. These stories slide across the skin, caress the mind, and rake their fingernails through our visions of our culture, our future, and our lives as we live them now. A beautiful read that will make you think and feel, and most importantly, think about what it is that you are feeling.

In her new book, "Boys Buy Me Drinks to Watch Me Fall Down," Anna Dickson James demonstrates a literary range that is truly astonishing. The domestic dramas "Proud to Be a Shriner's Wife" and "Who's a Good Girl?" share a cover with the Anderson-esque "The Girl in the Piñata," strange tales like "Mersa and the Cannibal" and "Stayin' Alive," and even a zombie story, "Sommelier Mort Vivant." The threads that run through it all are a fearless expression of modern womanhood and a complete command of the text. Dickson James is a writer of exceptional talent who keenly observes the triumphs and trials of women in all stages of life, and then delivers those lives back to us in delicious, captivating prose. I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

The characters in these stories are consumed, drowned, burned and worn away by daily life, by love and sex and marriage, by hungers of all sorts.  They are sublimated in the physical sense--a change of physical state--as well as in the psychological sense of channeling socially unacceptable urges into acceptable ones. I am making it all sound too cerebral, because in fact these stories are witty, honed, sexy, and darkly funny.The cover and title are perfect, but the real treasure here is in the author’s careful work.  These stories, even the fantastical ones, flow smoothly and seemingly effortlessly, which is of course the end result of untold hours of effort and craft.  Because of that, while practiced readers will enjoy this work, it would also be an excellent book to give to someone who doesn’t ordinarily read short stories.  It places the reader in the hands of a writer with a great deal to say and the talent to convey it, and to subsume her own self into these pages.  Reading this book and meeting the many facets of her weird and wonderful brain is a true joy.