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Ten Stories About Smoking by [Stuart Evers]

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Stuart Evers

Ten Stories About Smoking Kindle Edition

by Stuart Evers (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Distilled, distinctive and a little bit dangerous, a box of love and cigarettes from a bright new voice in fiction. These stories find dignity in quiet lives and beauty in dark corners. They tell of allure, betrayal, nostalgia, solitude, seduction, damage and desire. They are stories of youth mislaid and love lost, and of recovery. They go to the heart of things.

Length: 256 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Age Level: 18 and up

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Book Description

Distilled, distinctive and a little bit dangerous, a box of love and cigarettes from a bright new voice in British fiction --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Author

A former bookseller and editor, Stuart Evers now writes about books for the Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, Time Out and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Litro, The Book Club Boutique Magazine and on EverydayGenius.com. He lives in London.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN : B007K1I74I
Publisher : Picador; Main Market edition (1 May 2012)
Language : English
File size : 559 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 256 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 682,342 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 12,154 in Short Stories (Kindle Store)
- 14,166 in Short Stories (Books)
- 19,134 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
37 ratings

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4 star		25%
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1 star		6%

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Amazon Customer

Unusually good stories

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 May 2013

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It's the first time I've read Stuart Evers and I was pleasantly surprised. The best thing about this book is that Evers somehow manages NOT to have a particually style of short stories unlike many authors I've read whose style you can identify once you've read one or two of their stories. Evers' stories are thought-provoking, some heart-breaking and others quite funny. All beautifully written with unusual subject matters that make you envious of his imaginative prose and sheer technical story-writing ability. I loved it.!

2 people found this helpful

Kathryn Eastman

Had to give the stories room to breathe

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 May 2013

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

I'm always on the lookout for new collections of short stories. It's a form that I really enjoy reading. When I first saw this collection's title was Ten Stories About Smoking, it intrigued me. Some of the stories make scant reference to smoking or cigarettes - more like a wisp of smoke caught on a downdraught - while others place it more firmly in the centre of the story. But for me, this isn't a collection of stories about smoking but about melancholy. The sparseness of the writing and the sad or burdened characters Stuart Evers uses to give voice to his stories make this a melancholic collection. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it. I did. But this is a collection where I would read one story, put the book down and go away and think about what the story had to say. A few days later, I'd come back and read another story and do the same. Perhaps that's the best way to read any short story collection - by giving the individual stories the space they need to breathe? I enjoyed reading this collection but I found it universally sad in tone.

2 people found this helpful

Zipster Zeus

Excellent study in melancholic detachment

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2011

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

First of all apologies for being grumpy over this, but I think the packaging is a gimmick too far. I'm sure it's a good marketing technique, but the quality of these stories stand up on their own and don't need to be in a book packaged up as a box of cigarettes.

Anyway, grump over and I realise I may well be in a minority of one.

Whatever, short story collections of this sort these days seem to be immediately short-handed as `Carveresque;' indeed the last of Stuart Evers stories, The Last Cigarette,' features Raymond Carver himself, sharing the tale with a juxtapositioned hospitalised father back in the UK, both terminally ill and enjoying what they expect to be their `last cigarette.'

Although the style and tone of the stories are definitely rooted in the American short story, I found them not so much in the style of Carver, but more metropolitan and brooding in a `middle-class' fashion than Carver's more desparate, parochial studies in human disintegration.

In that way, the stories of Jay McInerney spring more to mind as Evers reference point than Carver. What Ever's does generate though, is a strong and well sustained air of studied melancholy and detachment in the best of trans-Atlantic traditions. And the common theme is not so much one of loss, but a sense of not knowing what you want and being unable to find a way of defining it, in the best of post-modern traditions.

There is in some stories however a rather tenuous link to smoking, as if cigarettes have been introduced as a peripheral issue in order to give the short story collection a common theme [another good marketing ploy], although the strongest stories such as 'The Last Cigarette' are the ones that put smoking cigarettes central to the whole point of the tale.

In this vein, one of the most affecting stories is `What's In Swindon,' which is also one of the shortest, which charts the brief reunion of two former lovers in a Swindon hotel to see if they can rediscover what they had previously lost. The woman who organised it finds they can't and I won't spoil it by telling you the reason why, but it's not for the reason you'd expect...

This is on the whole a very satisfying read and so far as literary calling cards go, a huge success for Evers. The simplicity and sustained atmosphere of the stories leaves one feeling as if you have as much read a novel as a short story collection, which to my mind gives you the best of both worlds.

I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next, as we need some new British writers breaking out and doing this sort of thing, rather than obsessing about writing books about the petit-bourgeoisie that will win the Booker prize.

4 people found this helpful

Lincs Reader

Gloomy, Dark but Strangly Alluring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 March 2011

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Short stories are not my favourite form of reading, but I'd heard lots about this collection and wanted to give it a go. The packaging on it's own makes the book stand out from the shelves and is very clever of the publisher. It's marketed in a cardboard carton that looks like a packet of cigarettes, the book is inside and extracted, just like a cig!
There is an air of darkness about all of these stories, with the theme of cigarette smoking running through them - the story of a bride-to-be who hunts down an ex-lover, to see if she has chosen the right man, only to be upset that he no longer smells of smoke, or the young girl who is recovering from a nervous breakdown who discovers that her whole world has become dirty and yellow and smelly.
Evers does not make smoking seem glamorous or cool, in fact, most of his characters lead a sad and lonely existance, which probably plays into the current anti-smoking trend.

There is no real continuity to the stories, either in content or in style and some of them feel a bit lacking, with abrupt endings that need a bit of figuring out

One person found this helpful

Rachel Green (author)

...and exhale.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2011

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Ten Stories about Smoking by Stuart Evers

I was sent a copy of this to review. Not the boxed edition, just a review paperback so I can't comment on the packaging.

I approached this set of short stories with a little trepidation. As an ex-smoker I didn't want the romanticism of smoking (and it does have a romantic element - think of film noir) to pull me back to its nicotine heart. I needn't have worried.

Although each of the ten stories involve smoking, in only a couple of them is smoking a central theme. In some it seems entirely redundant or is relegated to after-sex lighting up. Smoker or not, I would recommend this collection. The prose is truly wonderful, the short stories are wonderful captures of the human condition - snap shots of life, if you will.

My reference to film-noir was not accidental. Each of the stories feel like a slice of Ingmar Burton or the dark streets of Sam Spade. Try reading 'What's in Swindon' or 'Eclipse' wwithout being moved or finding yourself thinking about it hours or days later.

2 people found this helpful

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