Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona

People often romanticize the SouthWest, imagining coyotes and endless desert and cowboys; however modernity has cut off a lot of the romance. Wal*marts, strip malls, endless bars, parking lots, concrete offices, endless cold air chilling the outdoors dot this landscape. Harty knows this and invigorates his character, develops his plots and gives people a history, an emotional depth deeper than any desert valley. I am not sure whether his one more science short story in this collection is a hit or miss-a rather Bradbury-esque story, it is off from the rest of the book. His teenage/young adule male characters are intense, brooding, lost, and not always likeable-but you won't forget them. Their is a palable sadness, a desolateness nature in his writing, it is very moody, but there is a kind of hope borne of small suburban trials and tribulations that keeps you reading.

Ryan Harty has wowed me with this prize-winning collection. Each of the eight stories deals with sadness in indelible forms. One of my favorites in the collection centers around a husband and wife and their robot son who seems to be coming apart. The ways in which each family member handles the boy's breakdown mirror survival techniques of people dealing with illness: The wife distances herself; the husband tries to fix the situation; and the son tries to hide his problems. In another story, a brother cleans the apartment of his dead, mentally ill sister and ends up sweeping all of her cats out onto the street. The last story, September, is a gorgeous account of one young man's first love: the mother of one of his friends. I highly recommend this SSC!

While I was reading this book, I couldn't wait to get home from work so I could fall back into the stories. Now I'm walking around with the characters in my head, like old friends. It's a beautiful book, the kind you want to recommend to everyone you know. Ryan Harty is a wonderful writer.

I love short stories, and I lived for a while in Arizona, so a friend recommended this book to me. I thought it was amazing. Every story is riveting, and the characters are all incredibly complex and real. The stories pull you in and don't let go of you until the very end, and even then they stay with you (which is the truest sign of whether something is really good, I think). I loved "What Can I Tell You About My Brother?" and "Ongchoma" and "Crossroads." Harty is great at capturing family relationships, especially between brothers. He gets Arizona down perfectly. I can't wait to read whatever he writes next.

A truly exceptional new collection. I came to Harty's work through the 2003 "Best American Short Stories," where I read his beautiful, memorable "Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down." The story concerns a man who's facing a choice between his wife and his very human-seeming android son, who keeps breaking down despite his parents' best efforts. Far from seeming sci-fi-ish or even magical-realistic, the story draws its power from its sharp realism--you believe in this father's pain because Harty makes the situation so tangible, both in its physical and its emotional aspects. The stories in this collection are intimately concerned with the bonds of family and friendship; "Crossroads" follows a pair of brothers to a Led Zeppelin concert in the final days before the older brother departs for Vietnam, and in "What Can You Tell Me About Your Brother," we see a younger brother struggling with conflicting loyalties to school friends and to his troubled older brother. In all the stories, we're drawn along by our concern for the sharply-rendered, painfully believable characters. Ryan Harty's voice is smart, funny, sad, and memorable. It's fortunate for all of us that the John Simmons Award brought this outstanding new talent to light.