Books

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"Chronicler of Interiority"
Trevor's Unnerving Bits and Pieces
Decent, if forgettable, stories
"They did not go in for telling one another the story of their lives."
Tinkering with Secrets and Other Hidden Things

A Bit on the Side : Stories
William Trevor
Manufacturer: Amazon Remainders Account
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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William Trevor: The Collected Stories
After Rain: Stories
The Hill Bachelors
The Story of Lucy Gault
Runaway: Stories

ASIN: B000ELJ3L2

Book Description

William Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. In these twelve stories, a waiter divulges his shocking life of crime to his ex-wife; a woman repeats the story of her parents' unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, in the volume's title story, a middle-age accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair.

At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor's characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.

Customer Reviews:

"Chronicler of Interiority".......2007-01-22

Trevor, as usual, writes stories marked first of all by a startling realism of surface. The sights, sounds, smells of the external world are precisely captured and rendered. We see for instance the central female character of "A Bit On The Side" pecking away at a plastic wrapped salad from a nearby Pret a Manger, while her male companion eats a sandwich smelling faintly of marmite with lettuce leaves overhanging its edges. What we know, but the male companion can't, is that the woman continuing to eat her salad actually has no appetite for it. In such a minor detail lies the open sesame to Trevor's art. He takes the reader on a journey into the interior lives of his forlorn characters, showing us that what they reveal to others even in minor matters may be often less than the truth or even the opposite of it. In "Sitting With The Dead," a second example, the central figure Emily tells the visiting Legion of Mary sisters a lot but finally far less about her valuation of her late husband than we the readers are allowed to know. Trevor consistently exposes to his readers, then, that gap which renders people frequently opaque to one another and is in major matters at the core of their ultimate oddity, even mysteriousness. His is artistic fiction of the highest order.

Trevor's Unnerving Bits and Pieces.......2006-08-31

William Trevor is surely one of the most talented current writers of fiction, and a remarkable master of the short story form. And we find him at his best in "A Bit On the Side." His work is subtle, disquieting, unnerving, with a distinct tendency to transmute the fictional world he's constructing, that you thought you understood, into something quite different: and he does it right before your very eyes. Some of these stories are set in the United Kingdom, some in Ireland, as befits the work of an Irishman resident in the U.K.; a man never quite at home anywhere.

He gives us a woman waiting at a theater bar for a blind date she's going to regret meeting; a private midlands boys'school where nothing is as it should be; a hotel waiter who takes his job way too seriously.

And in his title story,of which we have certain expectations based on the world as we know it: well, he just turns them upside down. His people are sometimes kinder than you might expect, often nastier, but seldom what you thought you were getting.

Decent, if forgettable, stories.......2006-08-15

Perhaps mine is a case of mismanaged expectations, but I found this collection to be a merely average entry in the literary short story genre. The prose is excellent, of course, and some of the stories stand out, but most of them fail to impress, especially at their endings, which, almost without exception, are marked by forced poetry and profundity, as if Trevor felt that the story didn't hold well enough together on its own and needed an expository coda.

Overall, good but not great. Try some of his other stuff.

"They did not go in for telling one another the story of their lives.".......2006-08-12

The short story collection, "A Bit on the Side" from William Trevor contains 12 short stories. The stories cover a range of themes that focus on relationships and include aspects of loss, grief, and disappointing love affairs. In "Sitting with the Dead" two middle-aged women--the Geraghtys--arrive at the home of a recently deceased man. His widow Emily is waiting for the undertaker to arrive. After twenty-three years of marriage, Emily states, "there is no grief in this house." She was married for her money and the house she owned, and her feckless husband ran the property into the ground in order to support his dreams of possessing a champion racehorse. The Geraghtys absorb all of Emily's previously unexpressed thoughts, and their laconic, sympathetic style enables Emily to unburden herself to these two neutral, no-judgmental strangers.

In "Justina's Priest", Father Clohessy regrets the community's loss of faith in modern times, and worries about the fate of a young girl named Justina. She still attends church regularly, delivering her confession on cue, and the girl's confessions trouble the priest--for while they're perfectly structured, Justina is "sinless." She's devoted to the church, continually cleaning it, but she's also has the mental capacity of a five-old. While Justina's faith is simple, childlike and unchallenged, other people around Justina do not have such an easy time with life. She lives with her older, married sister Maeve, her husband and his father. When Justina begins receiving letters from a girl she used to know who is now a prostitute, the people in Justina's life all have different reactions to this. Father Clohessy, a man who struggles with feelings of uselessness, acknowledges the complications and disappointments of human nature while trying to ensure that Justina remains protected.

In "Evening Out", two middle-aged people, Jeffrey and Evie, arrange to meet on a blind date through a dating service. Used to disappointment, they each have their own agenda, and the evening is composed of a series of false pretences, deceptions, and superficial social niceties. When the evening's plan goes a little off course, both Jeffrey and Evie find that they can engage one another honestly--at least for a few hours.

In "Big Bucks", Fina and her fiance John Michael long to go to America. When John Michael finally leaves, Fina waits for him to return, and they plan their marriage. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as they imagined. John Michael is in essence an illegal immigrant, so he works whatever jobs he can, moving from place to place, and often unable to contact Fina for long periods of time. Just how this alters their love is the substance of this tale.

While the stories are not so dark as many of Trevor's wonderful novels, they tend to explore the quirky, unfathomable side of human relationships. Trevor fans will be pleased with the collection, and although these short stories do not reflect his best work, nonetheless, this is a good solid collection--displacedhuman

Tinkering with Secrets and Other Hidden Things.......2005-02-22

William Trevor guides us through streets and dank parlors and weakly lighted public places where his characters guard or choose to unravel those darker aspects of living he understands so well. In A BIT ON THE SIDE Trevor has written twelve short stories that could have been written by no one else. His prodigious gifts as a writer make him privy to the musings we all hold in private, knowing that voicing them would doubtless find misunderstanding glances in parting eyes of the people in retreat from our confessions.

Where does Trevor find these thoughts, much less these subtly drawn characters? In lonely corner tables in pubs, in the shy fears of wives of husbands departed in body or in spirit, in expectations of young Irish girls dreaming of better lives in America, or of poor pregnant mothers willing to offer their incipient child for adoption to spare their husband's jobless humiliation?

While William Trevor is a demanding author, one who graces his stories with subtle time lapses or changes that require the reader to be on the alert for the assured nuances of his craft, he is never less than amazing in his ability to paint portraits of people so odd in their ordinariness that ending a short story does not allow us to leave them alone. This is writing of the highest order - challenging, enriching, plangently longing, unforgettable. These are twelve treasures. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 2005

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A Bit on Teh Side
William Trevor
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000H74EJE

A Bit on the Side.(Book Review): An article from: Reviewer's Bookwatch

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A Bit on the Side.(Book Review): An article from: Reviewer's Bookwatch
Peter Lamal
Manufacturer: Midwest Book Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Reviewer's Bookwatch, published by Midwest Book Review on November 1, 2004. The length of the article is 2843 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A Bit on the Side.(Book Review)
Author: Peter Lamal
Publication: Reviewer's Bookwatch (Newsletter)
Date: November 1, 2004
Publisher: Midwest Book Review
Page: NA

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Bit on the Side: Work, Sex, Love, Loss and Own Goals

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Bit on the Side: Work, Sex, Love, Loss and Own Goals

Manufacturer: Parthian
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1905762054

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BITS ON THE SIDE
Ken Welsh
Manufacturer: New Eng. Lib.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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A Bit on the Other Side
Jack Booth
Manufacturer: New Playwrights' Network
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0863194281

A bit on the side: East-West topographies of desire

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A bit on the side: East-West topographies of desire
Chris Berry
Manufacturer: Empress
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 0646187708

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A Bit on the Side
Jasmine Birtles
Manufacturer: Piatkus Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Show Me The Money: The Financial Side of Selling Industrial Drill Bits Online

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Show Me The Money: The Financial Side of Selling Industrial Drill Bits Online
James Orr
Manufacturer: LearnToBeRich.com, Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
ASIN: B000O337US

A Bit on the Side: Tempting Sauces, Salads and Accompaniments - Over 100 Essential Recipes

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A Bit on the Side: Tempting Sauces, Salads and Accompaniments - Over 100 Essential Recipes
Silvana Franco , and Nicola Diggins
Manufacturer: Southwater Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1842156349

Book Description

This book provides a superb selection of sauces and salas, along with recipes for delicious dips, and relishes, raitas and marinades.

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