All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories. This item is unavailable.All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories

"Cheever's true heir, our major American short story writer."William Harrison Here are stories about fathers and sons, stories about men and women, and stories about the relationships between men by one of our most gifted story writers. The narrator of "The Who, the What and the Why," begins breaking into his own house as a sort of therapy after his daughter dies. In "The Human Use of Inhuman Beings," the main character realizes that his closest relationship is to an angel, who appears to him only to announce the death of loved ones. All Things, All at Once reminds us why Lee K. Abbott is to be treasured: his perfect pitch for tales of hapless Southwesterners, his way with sympathetic irony, his eye that skillfully notes the awkward humiliationscommon heartbreak, fractured familiesand records it all in lyrical, affectionate language. In tales new and from previous collections Abbott examines lived life and the lies we necessarily tell about it.

Lee K. Abbott (1947―2019), author, professor, and founder of the Ohio State University MFA Creative Writing Program, had stories and essays published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, New York Times Book Review, Southern Review, Epoch, Boulevard, Crawdaddy, North American Review, among others, and featured in The Best American Short Stories and The O'Henry Prize Stories. Abbott was the author of seven story collections including All Things, All At Once.