Reviews for Outside Paradise

The average rating for Outside Paradise based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-05 00:00:00 Marvin Applegate Pequenos Mistérios, de Bruce Holland Rogers, é uma colectânea de 40 contos, que obteve o World Fantasy Award na categoria "Colectâneas", em 2006. Foi a minha estreia no mundo da ficção curta e, apesar de ter lido críticas bastante positivas, não sabia muito bem o que esperar. O livro agrega os seus contos em cinco secções, mais ou menos temáticas: Histórias, Metamorfoses, Insurreições, Contos e Simetrinas. Gostei especialmente das Histórias e dos Contos, apesar de a leitura deste livro ter sido um prazer do início ao fim. Como já disse, os contos são bastante curtos (3-4 páginas, em média) e raro é aquele que não nos deixa a pensar: por várias vezes, senti a necessidade de reler frases/parágrafos para tentar apreender o seu conteúdo, ou pelo menos aquilo que representou para mim (não confundir com situações em que precisamos de reler frases/parágrafos para tentar perceber o que temos defronte dos olhos). Agradaram-me especialmente os contos que mais não eram do que pedaços da vida: deixam a nossa imaginação navegar pelos espaços em branco, pelo que terá acontecido antes e pelo que irá acontecer depois. O único senão deste livro é que os contos não devem ser lidos todos de seguida (i.e., de rajada) ou num ambiente propício à distracção: devem ser saboreados, apreendidos, degustados. Gostei imenso e recomendo vivamente a quem tiver predisposição para experimentar uma leitura diferente!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-02 00:00:00 Herry Setiadi Bruce Holland Rodgers is a prolific writer of short stories (in fact many of the stories he writes & and which appear in this collection are under the 1000 word mark thus making them "flash Fictions" and very few of them go past the 2,000 word mark). This is Rodgers 6th collection of fiction (and even though it was published in 2005, he hasn't seem to publish anything in paper form since). The collection consists of 40 stories divided into 5 sections: Stories, Metamorphosis, Insurrections, Tales, and Symmetrinas. Symmetrinas are a from that Rodgers developed him self that involves an odd amount of sections, with each subsequent section being twice the size of the previous section, with the middle section being the longest, and then each section after that being half as long, looks like a pyramid. One of these Symmetrians "The Main Design That Shines Through Sky and Earth" is the best story of the entire book, and it's about teachers. "The Djinn Who Lives Between Night and Day" is a flash fiction and comes in a close second, other great stories in the collection are: "The Beast" "The Dead Boy At Your Window" "Come the Revolution" "Sea Anemones" and "A Story for Discussion". The "good" stories bump this collection from 3 stars to 4 stars, some of which you can read off his website shortshortshort.com, but I always like to support authors I like, and I also greatly prefer the old fashion method of reading books on paper rather then a computer monitor or the hell spawned tablet. The rest of the stories are okay, not great, the section called Metamorphoses should have been skipped entirely, the best story in that section was "Sea Anemones", but it just kept rehashing the same storyline of people turning into something else, he was evidently inspired by Kafka, but of course Kafka only wrote one story on the subject. The opening of the collection (in which the rules of the Symmetrinas, there are other rules, are laid out) was written by Michael Bishop, and is also fairly interesting.