Cloudbursts

Collected and New Stories

By: Thomas McGuane

Narrated by: Graham Halstead

From one of our most acclaimed writers, a sumptuous gathering of his singular work in the short form - 45 stories, including seven entirely new pieces appearing for the first time in audiobook form.

For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume. Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and McGuane's hallmark Big Sky country, with its vast and unforgiving landscape, these are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship. Moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again, McGuane writes about familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness, celebrating the human ability to persist through life's absurdities.

Cover image: "Sunlight in Park, June 10, 1917" by Charles E. Burchfield. Reproduced with permission from the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Cover design by Carol Devine Carson.

©2018 Thomas McGuane (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Big-hearted fugitive impressions of fugitives.

McGuane’s short stories are perfectly drawn with generous observations of remote settings and characters arising from those settings, whether in opposition to them or as a natural extension of them; characters who often live in some form of literal or figurative exile and may seem remote even to themselves. His situations swell, sprawl and vanish always leaving an undercurrent of deep-welled emotion. The audiobook format was also great since I think McGuane writes in relation to oral traditions of storytelling.

My favorites included: Cowboy (one of my favorite short stories period), Vicious Circle, Flight, A Man in Louisiana, Sportsmen, Riddle, North Country, On a Dirt Road, Motherlode, Tango, Kangaroo, Viking Burial.

Everything in Cloudbursts is worth the listen. Would highly recommend listening to this book, reading your favorites, and then all over listening again!

McGuane... I’ll Take You There

It’s what Thomas McGuane does best, and what you wish for in any good book. This series of short stories (each!) gently grabs you— and transports you inside another time, place, and plot. But McGuane’s writing style is so deft, it does it seamlessly too. His prose is so professional, so good... you also don’t trip over stiltedness, awkward sentences, or such truck. I stole that cliché from Mark Twain, because just now my mind told me, they’re something alike. CLOUDBURSTS is a long series of fun, interesting, different landscapes and small, life adventures.

Enjoy the ride. I guarantee you will.

Not For Me

Narration sounds computer generated, but it isn't. There is a monotony and lack of inflection in the narrator's voice that might be driven by the stories themselves. The characters are often not interesting and the stories are not memorable.

Read this book

McGuane’s short stories rival the best of his novels. Unity, intensity and brevity: the classic characteristics of a short story, and is a cloudburst.

A lot of these don't end. They just stop.

I'm really unimpressed by the source material, though the performance is excellent. The author is another yutz, in a coterie including other yutzes like Jim Harrison, who thinks that bird hunting, fly fishing, and other Manly Outdoor Sports have some deep and transcendant meaning. These short stories are so much like Harrison, at times, that I lost track of whose stories I was hearing. Harrison tells the same story over and over. At least it is a whole story. Much of this collection is like watching the middle third of a movie. Cannot recommend.