Audiobook4 hours
All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories
Written by Mark Slouka
Narrated by Cris Dukehart and James Anderson Foster
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
In eleven beautifully wrought stories-ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California's Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest-Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our backs are to the wall. Whether battling the end of desire, the fact of injustice, or death itself, the men and women in these stories are willing to use whatever comes to hand-luck, accident, desperate gesture-to emerge victorious.
In "Crossing," a father hoping to compensate for his failures finds himself facing his past while fording a river with his young son on his back; in "Conception," a young couple frozen by the possible end of their marriage is offered an unexpected way back; in "Half- Life," a proud, aging shut-in finds her resolve tested by an extraordinary visitor determined to shatter her solitude. Alternately harrowing and redemptive, these are stories of ordinary men and women, doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life.
In "Crossing," a father hoping to compensate for his failures finds himself facing his past while fording a river with his young son on his back; in "Conception," a young couple frozen by the possible end of their marriage is offered an unexpected way back; in "Half- Life," a proud, aging shut-in finds her resolve tested by an extraordinary visitor determined to shatter her solitude. Alternately harrowing and redemptive, these are stories of ordinary men and women, doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life.
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Reviews for All That Is Left Is All That Matters
Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This elegiac collection is often melancholy but never sentimental, even as his characters contend with losses both small and enormous. Slouka is strong on the form, with a deft control of language and, in particular, plotting—each of his characters, even the youngest, meets some form of great change head-on and has to shift their own inner map, either subtly or on a grand scale, and it's to his credit that all are different and seismic in their own ways. A recurring young protagonist, the son of Czech immigrants (as is the author), is particularly engaging as he grapples with his emerging awareness of family dynamics during late-1960s lakeside summers. Notable stories for me were "Dominion," "The Hare's Mask," "August," and one, "Dog," was so deeply affecting and disturbing—yet beautiful, and really masterful—that it made me sob, and I can't remember the last time a short story did that (I don't think I can ever read it again, either.) This is a lovely, very adult, body of work.