Wet Places at Noon

Iowa Short Fiction Award

By: Lee K. Abbott

Narrated by: Ken Krauss

Abbott's community is pure Americana, a wild world inhabited by gloriously street-smart smartasses: overeducated, underemployed men mourning for the confident women who have left them - or have they? - but knowing that equally confident women are just around the corner-or are they? His urgent, maximalist style allows their exhilarating voices to be heard and remembered.

©1997 Lee Abbott (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“Lee Abbott is a significant American writer, one of our culture's more compelling stylist, an acrobat of the word. Abbott's voice has the familarity of a front-porch storyteller, the voice of the guy in every picture of every high-school prom who has what he wrongly thinks is a firm grip on life and love and from that point thereafter disappears into an unkind world.” (Bob Shacochis)

“Abbott writes like a fallen angel. These are wild, vibrant stories, caustic and sardonic, wildly funny and bitter as grief, full of passion and perfidy. As his characters crash through burnt-over landscapes and tune into 'the talk talked by worms,' they bring us an odd kind of hope.” (Andrea Barret)

Narration is off

I love Abbott's storytelling. But I had difficulty overlooking the narrator's mispronunciation of Spanish which even the local redneck gringos get right. Disappointingly marred the narrative.

Buckle your seatbelt...

Abbott's voice sweeps you up, enfolds you in a bearhug and carries you breathlessly along on a roller coaster ride of wonderful, treacherous, very human emotions. If you are lucky--as some of his characters are--you will also find moments of true enlightenment.

Masterful Writing Well Read!!

Any additional comments?

I don't know why I haven't heard of Lee K. Abbott before. He is a master wordsmith weaving unlikely, sometimes laugh-out-loud stories about ordinary people. I was so taken with this that I listened to it practically in a single day. Ken Krauss has a cadence that matches the authors rhythms well. He knows how to stay out of the way and let the story unfold. A perfect approach to this masterful work. The author touches on a myriad of issues in this collection of short stories, including: relationships between broken people, the Vietnam war, and Aliens in Roswell. I think men particularly will find themselves represented truthfully in all their complexity. I highly recommend it!