Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules By David Sedaris

Matthew

They put David Sedaris's name all over this thing. It wasn't until after I had checked it out that I realized it was not just Sedaris and it was not his usual non-fiction storytelling. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is kind of like that feeling when you pick up a glass expecting it to be full and it is actually empty; a bit disorienting at first, but I eventually realized what I was dealing with and settled in.

The stories were okay. Basically just low motivation, day to day kind of stuff. A bit artsy at points. One of them was a little hard to follow. I can sum it up not by saying that they were great short stories, or that they were bad short stories, they were just short stories - nothing more, nothing less.

Do I recommend it? If you are doing a book challenge and you need to fill a short story quota, this is perfect (and not too long overall if you are not a big short story fan). If you are here reading this review because you are a Sedaris fan, definitely know that this is not typical Sedaris - his name prominently displayed on the cover is pure marketing strategy.

Calista

I made the assumption that David Sedaris wrote these stories. While reading this story, I kept thinking something is wrong. This doesn't feel like David. It turns out that David Sedaris is the editior of all these other short stories. They are stories that he leaves.

I didn't laugh at these. They are more drama stories. They weren't bad stories, but they were not very memorable. They are simply stories. I much prefer David's stories. I'm a little disappointed in this one. Oh well.

The stories in the collection include and written by:

Introduction by David Sedaris
Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired by Richard Yates
Gryphon by Charles Baxter
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Half A Grapefruit by Alice Munro
Applause, Applause by Jean Thompson
I Know What I'm Doing About All the Attention I've Been Getting by Frank Gannon
Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out by Patricia Highsmith
The Best of Betty by Jincy Willett
Song of the Shirt, 1941 by Dorothy Parker
The Girl with the Blackened Eye by Joyce Carol Oates
People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk by Lorrie Moore
Revelation by Flannery O'Connor
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel
Cosmopolitan by Akhil Sharma
Irish Girl by Tim Johnston
Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff
Epilogue by Sarah Vowell

Katie

I gave this book to a friend for her birthday a few years ago and she mentioned that while she loved the book, it was proving to be life threatening. She was reading while walking, while eating, while riding her bike...it was an accident waiting to happen.

The thing about this collection of short stories (chosen, not authored, by David Sedaris) is that every time I finished a story I would think, "Oh definitely. That is my favorite short story EVER." Then, I would read the next story and find that I had fallen hopelessly in love with a completely different short story.

My absolute, top of the line favorites? "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" had me sobbing. The narrator uses a casual tone to discuss a traumatic event from her childhood. The story is chilling, honest, and surprising. Every time I finish this story, I end up thinking about it for weeks afterward.

In "Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk..." Lorrie Moore crafts a humorous and heartbreaking story about a woman whose child has a tumor. I know, hilarious right? Lorrie Moore managed to make me laugh and cry, multiple times.

"Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff is a very short and beautiful story about a book critic in a bank hold up. I can't say anything else about why I love this story without spoiling it. Sorry.

"In the Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried" by Amy Hempel makes me cry a lot too. It's another funny and heartbreaking story about dying (Am I a little obsessesed? Maybe. So?) and is told from the perspective of the best friend. Sad pants, people. Sad pants.

I could easily talk about why I love (or have a mad crush on) all of these stories, but I will just let you read it yourself.

Plus, a portion of the money raised from the sales of this book benefits 826, which is a non-profit writing center that helps students in cities all across this great nation.

Julie

This is a short story collection selected by David Sedaris and introduced by him also. There are five stories. Each interested or intrigued me and appeared quite different.

The first is: Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out by Patricia Highsmith and ready by Cherry Jones. This story seemed to be about the relationship between sisters. One sister, presumably the younger one as she seems a bit tentative about her sibling's impending visit and possible judgment and becomes very aware of the shortcomings of her home environment.

She is overcome with remorse when she discovers that through her neglect her "geranium was nothing but a crooked dry stalk in its pot now at the extreme left of the windowsill where the sun lingered longest." And she goes on to ask herself, "Why was she always rushing so? She forgot all about doing the nice things, all the little things that gave her real pleasure."

The second story is: Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff and read by Toby Wherry and appears to be about the initial event and then the aftermath of how a man receives a bullet in the brain.

"The bullet is already in the brain, it won't be outrun forever or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind dragging its comets tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce."

The third story is: Gryphon by Charles Baxter and read by David Sedaris and is about a rather unusual substitute teacher who introduces substitute facts to a class of students. I learned a new word: fossicking, which means burrowing.

The fourth story is: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried by Amy Hemple and read by Sarah-Louise Parker. The themes are grief, death and sign language.

"What seems dangerous often is not, black snakes for example or clear air turbulence. While things that just lie there like this beach are overloaded with jeopardy."

The fifth story is: Cosmopolitan by Akhil Sharma and is read by him also. The themes appear to be longing, love and loneliness.

"The station wagon was so old that the odometer had gone all the way around like me he thought and like Helen too. This is who we are he thought, dusty, corroded, and dented from our voyages with our unflagging hearts rattling on the inside."

George Ilsley

A challenging collection of short stories selected by David Sedaris. It may defy expectations, if one expects light humour or satire. There are some classics in here, such as "The Garden Party" (
Katherine Mansfield) as well as new writers I had not previously encountered. The
Alice Munro story, "Half A Grapefruit" I had recently read in the original collection, but somehow it read differently in this volume.

One or two of these pieces I basically skimmed/skipped — but let's not get into that.

Any good strong collection will hit you different ways, from different angles, and strike you in a manner you did not expect. What I learned here is that David Sedaris as an editor leans surprisingly dark — in a good way.

Grace

As a big fan of David Sedaris, let me just say that I am very very glad he has not been able to better emulate his writing heroes. Because for a very talented storyteller, the man has appalling taste in stories.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a Sedaris-edited short story collection. Sedaris makes clear in the book's introduction that these are stories by authors he particularly loves, and that he aims to be as great as he thinks they are. Oh dear.

The version I listened to is abridged--quite abridged, actually. It only contains five of the 17 stories included in the print version. The first story, Patricia Highsmith's "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" (read by Cherry Jones) is one of the dullest 45 minutes I have ever spent. A plodding account of a neurotic middle-aged woman preparing for a a visit from her judgmental sister, the story seems to be intended to be farcical, but it's just. not. funny. I ended up with no feeling for either of the two characters, no laughs, no thoughts, and mainly amazing relief when it was finally over.

On the other end of the book is "Cosmopolitan," by Akhil Sharma (read by the author), and it similarly dragged and irritated me. It's the story of a newly separated Indian-American man who falls in love with his neighbor, and again I felt nothing but distaste for the characters and there wasn't actually any plot with which to get involved. Bah.

The only high point of the audio collection was Mary-Louise Parker's reading of Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." A brief interlude into the life of a young woman watching her best friend die, the story is well-written and completely heartbreaking, and Parker's reading is excellent (better, even, than the reading Sedaris himself does of a silly story about a substitute teacher, "Gryphon," by Charles Baxter).

I like David Sedaris. I like short stories, especially in audio format. I was really, really excited about this little collection. So it's difficult to admit how much it sucked, but it really, really did. The print version may well be better (though it really seems to me that short stories are meant to be read aloud), as it includes some stories I know are of higher quality, including "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates and "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, as well as an afterward by Sarah Vowell. However, I was so put off by this sampling I probably won't pick it up to see.

Karen Germain

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see David Sedaris speak at UCLA. In my haste to make sure that I had read all of Sedaris' books, I bought " Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules" on my Kindle. It turns out, that this a collection of Sedaris' favorite short stories and he edited the compilation.

I am not the slightest bit disappointed that this wasn't a collection of Sedaris stories, because the selections he picked are fantastic. In fact, this is probably the best collection of short stories that I have ever encountered. Not a bad one in the bunch. Most of them are really depressing and downright hard to read. In particular, "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolsen in Buried" by Amy Hempel and "People Like That are the Only People Here" by Lorrie Moore. Both stories deal with different aspects of cancer and both are honest and heartbreaking.

I think the only story that I had previously read, was Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies." It's such a well crafted story, that I really enjoyed a second read of it. Really, this is an outstanding short story collection and I cannot praise it enough. Read it!!!

melydia

A friend gave me this, as we are both Sedaris fans. None of this is his work (save the introduction, which was on par with most of his better essays), but I decided to trust his judgment and try something new. As with most collections, the stories were of varying quality.

Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out by Patricia Highsmith, read by Cherry Jones: Mildred is rushing around frantically to prepare for her sister Edith’s visit. The reader was great, but the story itself was pretty boring. Maybe it was because I just wasn’t all that interested in the characters, or maybe because all the minutia felt excessively detailed.

Bullet In the Brain by Tobias Wolff, read by Toby Wherry: A fascinating little vignette that stretches out an instant of time into a fully coherent narrative, and it ended at just the right spot too.

Gryphon by Charles Baxter, read by David Sedaris: A new substitute teacher with crazy ideas. Sedaris did an excellent job, which is kind of surprising since he tends to narrate in a sort of monotone, but somehow he managed to get across everything with subtle changes in pitch and inflection. Probably my favorite of the batch.

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel, read by Mary-Louise Parker: I’ll be perfectly honest here: I had a whole lot of trouble following this one. Maybe I was just distracted, but I have absolutely no idea what it was about.

Cosmopolitan written and read by Akhil Sharma: A somewhat strange tale about an older Indian man attempting to have an affair with his American neighbor. Sharma probably should not have read his own story, as his cadence tended toward the droning, but I still very much enjoyed the story, and the ending made me smile.

In all, not a bad collection. These are the sorts of stories we’d read in creative writing classes, which gave me weird flashbacks from time to time, but it was a nice break from the string of novels I’d been listening to lately.

Miranda Reads

John

I'm not a regular reader of fiction, but when I find an author I enjoy, I tend to read the entire collection of his/her work. I love David Sedaris's humor and writing, so purchased this along with several of his other books. When I learned that this was "just" a collection of his favorite short stories instead of his own words, I was disappointed. That feeling of disappointment continued through about half of the stories in Hercules, some of which I had to force myself to finish, and one of which I just couldn't. There are some strong favorites here, though, by authors I will learn more about.

"Interpreter of Maladies" was wonderful.

"Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" appealed to me.

"People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" was exceptionally moving.

"Irish Girl" connected with me for reasons I don't understand.

"The Girl with the Blackened Eye" was horrifying and riveting.

"Bullet in the Brain" was a near-Sedaris ending to the collection that I morbidly enjoyed quite a bit.

But the book is an uneven as you'd expect such a collection of random stories and authors to be, and I can't say that I truly enjoyed picking it up every day.

emjay

Don't get freaked out when you see two stars next to David Sedaris' name...he didn't write the book, he just edited it. But, that's why I was so surprised. It's an interesting collection and not at all what you might assume Sedaris would pick as his favorite short stories. Actually, a lot of them were about death, so not his usual fun topics like midget guitar teachers or christmas whores. But death, or almost dying. So yeah, this is actually a pretty morbid collection of stories. If I could individually star them I would give 5 stars to two of the stories: "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri and "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter. Read those two.
Oh, but despite the two stars you should buy it because it supports 826NYC.

rachel misfiticus

I am very happy that I borrowed this book.
Although the proceeds go to 826nyc, and that is good, the book itself is a waste of time.
The stories within are either ones I have read many times before (i.e."Revelation" Flannery O'Connor*) or are stories that made my eyes contort from boredom (i.e. "The Garden Party" Katherine Mansfield).
Sarah Vowell's epilogue explaining 826nyc is so poorly constructed I closed the book after 3 sentences.

*I really like O'Connor, but I was hoping for authors who are more obscure. Authors I wasn't forced to read as a student.

Brian

A really fabulous collection of stories from masters of the craft; Hempel, Baxter and Wolff's are my favorite. The audio version is extremely well done - Sedaris reading "Gryphon" was the best of the bunch. Highly recommended.

Elianne Elderen

Het beste van het hele boek is de titel.

(Verder een beetje teleurgesteld. Onderstaande passage was het dan wel weer waard, maar het enige noemenswaardige.)

“It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him—her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and “Let’s hide Mr. Mole!” Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will—not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.”
He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college class-mate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.”

Briane Pagel

Because I'm contrarian by nature, I once came up with a theory as to why you can judge a book by its cover. The theory is this: if I like a cover, I will probably like the book. The reasoning behind it is: someone had to design a cover and to do that they had to at least know something about the book. They then distilled that feeling about the book into an image, and they liked the image (or they wouldn't have created it). If I like the image, I am at least somewhat likely to like the thinking behind it -- i.e., the book.

So I was curious to see if I would like the same kind of stories David Sedaris does. Sedaris, one of my favorite authors, was the inspiration for me to start writing funny versions of my life on here, way back when, and before I stopped doing that so much because it started being kind of repetitious not just of myself, but of other people writing about their lives, as well.

As an aside, I've come to realize that if I think something looks picturesque, probably lots and lots of people think that. I've also come to realize that many of the basic 'truths' we think about life -- parenting, etc. -- are 'truths' that everyone else knows, too, and while I still take pictures I like regardless of whether other people are also taking a picture of the same thing [and it's kind of disconcerting, when you stop to take a picture of someone, to see someone else doing that at the same time], I stopped writing about things I think are more or less just the same things everyone is thinking.

Anyway, Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and even if people accuse him of making stuff up, he's funny and his stories have, as Stephen Colbert would say, a 'truthiness' about them; plus, they're unique. They manage to somehow wring a universal feel out of, say, putting a bunch of record albums up around his house to stop birds from flying into it.

In Children Playing Before A Statue of Hercules, Sedaris picked some of his favorite short stories of all time to put into an anthology. This, I figure, is as much a cash grab as any of the other ones I complain about on here. After all, the only reason I checked this book out was Sedaris' name on the cover; a random collection of short stories probably wouldn't have risen above the clutter otherwise. But my lack of disdain for the project isn't just because I like Sedaris; it's because unlike most 'cash grabs' this one actually has merit.

The only theme joining the stories is that Sedaris liked them all. Beyond that, they are a very disparate set of works. (The audio version, which is the one I had, has only five stories; the print version is longer.) In order of least to most favorite,

Cosmopolitan, about a relationship between a neighbor and lonely Indian man whose wife left him after their grown-up daughter moved out, was tedious and felt, to use a word I find apt, typical. The story unfolds in exactly the way you would imagine from that setup, and doesn't contain any surprises; typical stories can be okay, if they're well-done or interesting, but this one wasn't either of those.

Where The Door Is Always Open And The Welcome Mat Is Out was enjoyable enough, the story of a sister in New York getting a visit from her sister from Cleveland, and the stress and disappointment of that visit; the whole story takes place in about 12 hours, and is told from the perspective of the New York sister, whose attempts to see her own life as something her sister would approve of are sadly amusing.

From there the stories pick up a lot. In The Cemetary Where Al Jolson Is Buried, about the last meeting between two friends, one of whom is dying, is funny until it's not, and was one of those short stories that stick in my mind. Gryphon, about an unusual substitute teacher who believes in angels and tells students' fortunes was the same; in the latter, the story is told from the perspective of a student in the small town, one who clearly wants the world to be magical the way the teacher says it is, even though he knows deep down that it's not.

The best story is the shortest: Bullet In The Brain, about a man who happens to be in a bank when the bank robbers get there, is a classic, and I won't spoil it for you by telling you why other than to say the title is not a metaphor of any sort, but quite literal.

So: 80% matchup between me and Sedaris on stories we like, which actually is about what I expected when I first began the book, which I correctly judged by its cover.

☮Karen

David Sedaris, who I think is quite funny, put these stories together from his list of favorites and I agree with the reviewer who said he has some strange taste in stories. Actually she said appalling but I did at least like the first one, maybe only because it came from Patricia Highsmith. Through the rest, my mind wandered.

Rebecca

This is a compilation of David Sedaris' favorite short stories by literary greats such as Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor and Dororthy Parker, just to name a few. With a crowd like this, you can expect stories that will leave you ever so slightly unsettled, such as Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" and Lorrie Moore's troubling tromp through a pediatric cancer ward in "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk." The stories seem to gather eccentric value as the book progresses. They are provocative and probably not best read right before bed. But Sedaris has indeed gathered the best of the best, and each of the stories represents an intricate piece of literary art.

But there is another reason to buy this book. All the proceeds benefit 826NYC, an afterschool tutoring organization that also does community outreach by way of writing workshops for young people. Literature to help foster literature-it is a great idea and one worthy of support.
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Judy

One of the reasons that I love David Sedaris is that he shares my love of reading and books. In his introduction, Sedaris reflected about books and wrote that, in his opinion, "a good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. This led to a kind of trance that made the dullest work, the dullest life, bearable." And he claimed that "I believed, and still do, that stories can save you." Exactly! David Sedaris wrote the introduction to this book and he has picked his favorite short stories to be enjoyed by readers. The authors are as varied as the stories and include Alice Munro, Dorothy Parker, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Patricia Highsmith, and Flannery O'Connor. I picked up this book expecting it to be authored by David Sedaris and, after my initial surprise, found myself engrossed in the wonderful short fiction.

Alisa Muelleck

I've listened to a lot of David Sedaris over the years, and I think he writes fantastic prose and memoirs. We are of the same mind when it comes to what short stories we like. I honestly loved almost every single story he chose for this collection, and those I didn't love I certainly respect. Since he is so open about so many aspects of his life, it's not a stretch to see what drew him to each of these stories, and they are by turns terribly shocking, mysterious, happy, and always great prose. It also has a wonderful introduction - sometimes intros by guest editors can be long and esoteric, but his is a memoir of reading, and it really brings the collection together. Also, it's a great, great nonprofit to be supporting, and I was happy to buy it.

Heather

This is such a good collection of short stories! Immediately upon finishing the book, I went back and reread my favorites. I spent most of the book almost-but-not-quite crying. So many feelings!

Greg

An eclectic short story collection offering Sedaris' fav writers. Richard Yates opener, "Oh Joseph, I'm So Tired" (1957) is excellent but to say more might ruin it for a reader. O'Connor's "Revelation" (1965) appears often in collections, but it makes perfect sense why Sedaris, the once-bullied southern kid, likes it so much. Tim Johnson's "Irish Girl" (2002) offers this gem: "What's [a fascist]?"..."He's the guy who ends up full of bullet holes with old ladies pissing on him in the town square." Exactly.

Tracey

Checked this collection out in audiobook form from the library for the 5 hr drive up to my family cottage at the end of July. I'd seen it listed in the library newsletter as a New Arrival and since I enjoy Sedaris' work so much, I thought I'd give it a try. Note that the audiobook version is abridged & contains only 5 of the stories from the print edition. I now own a paperback copy as a pass-along from my Mom.

With this book, Sedaris selected examples of writing he has been astounded by, in an attempt to both bring attention to the genre and share his love of the form. With the exception of one of the stories, I was astounded as well. All the authors were new to me (tho I'd heard of Highsmith) and I have added some names & books to my To Read list thanks to this collection.

* "Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, read by Cherry Jones.
The main character, a NYC studio apartment spinster, is anxious about her sister visiting from Cleveland Ohio. A period piece; the details are marvelous, as is the strained conversation between the two. I definitely need to read more short stories by Ms. Highsmith.

* "Bullet In the Brain" by Tobias Wolff read by Toby Wherry.
The fastidiously sarcastic protagonist is an unfortunate bystander in a bank robbery; we travel with him through the last few moments of his life. Powerful imagery.

* "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter read by David Sedaris
Oh, how I'd love to be the teacher in this story! A schoolboy in a small town describes a couple of strange days with a substitute teacher. Another author I may have to find out more about.

* "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel read by Mary-Louise Parker
A ruefully funny and tragic first person tale of a young woman dealing with the impending death of a friend. Another addition to the To Read list.

* "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma read by the Author
Unfortunately, this story didn't really do much for me at all. A middle-aged Western Indian faces the loss of his family thru divorce and growing up; he falls in lust with a semi-eccentric neighbor.

Elizabeth A

I'm not a short story fan, so you might be justified in wondering why I read this one. I blame George Eliot. I kept trying various things to pull me out of the Grand Canyon sized reading slump that Middlemarch abandoned me in; I could clearly see the rim but seemed unable to get up there.

I'm a Sedaris fan, and his writing almost always makes me smile, so why not try this collection of short stories curated by him? I read somewhere that this audiobook is an abridged collection - it only has 5 of the 17 stories in the book - but that's OK with me. If you are a Sedaris fan, you'll totally understand why he loves these stories - they are in his wheel house.

1. Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out by Patricia Highsmith, narrated by Cherry Jones. 3 stars.

This is the story of woman in New York getting ready for the arrival of her sister. Classic domestic fiction, with Highsmith's whiff of tension.

2. Bullet In the Brain by Tobias Wolff, narrated by Toby Wherry. 2 stars.

A short look at the last moments of a man's life while he robs a bank.

3. Gryphon by Charles Baxter, narrated by David Sedaris. 4 stars.

Life went along its usual boring way until a substitute teacher with crazy notions walked in. Sedaris is excellent at narrating this one, and it is my fave of the collection.

4. In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried by Amy Hempel, narrated by Mary-Louise Parker. 3 stars.

A story of illness and loss, and the inability to be the person we want to be for others in their time of need.

5. Cosmopolitan written and narrated by Akhil Sharma. 2 stars.

This is a strange (Sedaris kind of strange) story of an Indian man and his shapely neighbor. My least fave narration of the lot.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked this collection as much as I did, and I might seek out the book to read the stories I missed.

Adrianne Mathiowetz

I've been putting off this review, because it's *hard* to review a bunch of completely unrelated stories by authors who also have no connection (beyond "David Sedaris likes them" -- and for the record, the man has motley tastes).

Overall I really enjoyed the book, but there's no basic summary I can give, no message to take home. It was all over the map, from Katherine Mansfield to Tobias Wolff to Dorothy Parker to Jhumpa Lahiri.

A collection like this, of equally strong writing from a diverse collection of authors, does give the reader this, however: you can really begin to gauge your general preferences. I like older fiction that gives me a sense of what life was like before I was around to experience it ("The Garden Party", "Where The Door Is Always Open and The Welcome Mat is Out", "Song of The Shirt, 1941"). I like new fiction that is playful with the medium while still striking emotional chords ("The Best of Betty"). And I like Jhumpa Lahiri without being able to categorize why. But! I'm tired of stories about Weird Teachers ("Gryphon"), and Complicated Family Life ("Half a Grapefruit"). I still appreciated the writing, they just . . . don't fit into what I want to be reading right now.

Highly recommended to Sedaris fans trying to get into his head with a literary soundtrack to his life, and to just about anyone wondering "what do I like?" -- because hey, it's bound to be in here somewhere.

Leslie

The first four stories in this collection are stunning examples of why I don't write fiction; the language, the occurrences, the essential sense of place and time--all are there. While I knew of most of the writers of stories in this collection, I had never taken the opportunity to explore their work. Thank you, David Sedaris, for putting together this collection and introducing it in such a way that I actually laughed out loud during my morning commute after a week away from work; no mean feat, that.

The Patricia Highsmith story (read by Cherry Jones, one of my favorite character actors) placed me solidly in New York City of the late 1940s-early 1950s and in the shoes of a working woman of the era, while a Tobias Wolff one made me gasp with the audacity of subject. Charles Baxter is every bit as wonderful as I'd been led to believe, and Sedaris reads his story beautifully, but it was finally--finally!--experiencing an Amy Hempel short story--read by Mary Louise Parker--that clinched this collection as one of those, "I'm so glad I took the time to listen to this!" revelations.

The last story keeps me from rating this "Amazing". It was fine and heartbreaking, but placed at the end of such company...only okay. But that's fine...the other four more than made up for this.

Allison

Let me begin by saying that I only picked this book up at the store because of the name on the cover: David Sedaris. I like a lot of his writing, so I figured I might like what he likes, as well. The trouble is, I don't love most short story collections. So I knew this would be a challenge.

Did Sedaris' collection pass?

Well, I enjoyed his introduction. I also enjoyed the way the stories connected by sometimes obvious, sometimes tenuous threads. Oftentimes I struggle to understand why stories belong to a given collection, but reading this was like solving a fun puzzle. So as an editor, I have to give Sedaris props: he must read a lot of short stories in order to pull out and select a collection that coheres in such a smooth way.

However, as happens with many short story collections, I didn't love most of the stories. There were a few that did both impress and entertain me, such as "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates (an author I already know and love), and "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, but for the most part I made my way through the book without being "swept away."

AmberBug com*

I love David Sedaris and I went to see him live... he recommended some books to read and then I found this collection he compiled. I am not a huge fan of short stories. I like them only if the story completes itself and isn't all about symbolism and themes. A few stories I loved and some I couldn't get into (... borderline hated). If you like short stories, David Sedaris is a great author with excellent taste and I am sure this compilation will not disappoint. If not, go into it realizing it's what it is... that's what got me through it. Thankfully there were a few stories to make the book worthwhile.

Elizabeth

I hate to admit this but I bought it because I thought the stories might be funny. I should have not been so foolish for David Sedaris, the editor, is both funny and heartbreakingly sad himself and so it is with the stories. I really liked his selections and cried at one or two or three, maybe four, possibly five. The stories are written by acknowledged masters as Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro and Amy Hempel. Additionally, he included some authors I had never read and some I never knew wrote short stories like Patricia Highsmith. I want to read more of Akhil Sharma and am especially eager to read more of Jean Thompson.

Angela

I'm a huge fan of several writers in this collection, but they are NOTHING like David Sedaris. This book left me feeling sex crimed - which is what happens within its pages during one of the worst stories ever put on paper. And though I love Lorrie Moore, I didn't care for her tale about the baby pooping blood. Like the rape tale, it felt too sensational without a very strong concept.

Love Sedaris, but after this I would never take reading recommendations from him.

Kate

With David Sedaris as the editor, I was expecting more of the stories to be humorous, and I was surprised to find so many stories that were, frankly, depressing. That didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the collection, though. I suppose it would be difficult to go wrong with that collection of authors. Very enjoyable.

Title	:	Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules
Author	:	David Sedaris
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0743276124
ISBN-10	:	9780743276122
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	344
Publication	:	First published March 29, 2005

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules Reviews

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules Reviews

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