This collection of short stories definitely provide food for thought. While they weren't necessarily all about Holly they did give us a sneak peak into the dysfunctional lives of some of the rich and famous. It highlight how lives can be ruined through misuse of alcohol, how marriages entered into frivolously quite likely will end in tears, about the tough demands of motherhood, about love, and loss and so on. So many themes appeared here, dealt with beautifully in exquisite prose that held me focused from the beginning of each take to the final word. They were each superb in length, the stories were concise and whole enough to get a feel for the character without requiring extensive details. These stories really were very enjoyable. I highly recommend.

These tales were interesting, but not my cup of tea. I think that half of me went along with the words in these stories, but the other half was confused by the writing. Some sentences I had to go back and read again because I was thinking that I had the wrong word. To me, it looked like some words maybe were repetitive so the author had to use a synonym to make sure it didn't repeat too much. I think that these actions caused the writing to simply not flow for me. If I have a hard time with a flow of a book, it's almost always a do not finish situation. However, I just powered through this one to see what each story entailed.

Some of the stories were alright, some of them were just plain dull. I think that this dullness was a contributing factor of the flow of the writing. If there's nothing interesting going on, and the words don't make sense, it seems that the dullness would be escalating per story. It was sometimes a struggle to get through. I hate to be so brutally honest, but I was glad that the stories were so short that I could finish them quickly. 

 I hope next time Christine Schutt just puts her thoughts out on paper without having to change her wording. It was confusing and just difficult to read. I would definitely give her another chance in the future to see if there are differences on how it could be better.

I don't tend to read a lot of short story collections, but usually when I do I remind myself that I really like them - this was not the case.  I couldn't connect or care about any of the stories.  The way I rate short story collections is if I have the feeling that I wish at least one or more of the stories were to be expanded into a full novel, then that is a good collection in my book.  I couldn't find one story in this collection that I wanted more from.  



I am going to keep this short and quick since I don't want to dwell on the negative.  I would love to hear if you have read something else by Christine Schutt and if I should try something else?

The stories are good overall. However, the attempts are inner explorations of the characters only end up in confusion and ultimately, a bit underwhelming.

The stories dragged. Very slow and some were actually boring. I could not finish this book.Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book. Although I received the book in this manner, it did not affect my opinion of this book nor my review.

Though I liked the book, I made the decision when I finished not to review it on my site because it didn't fit into my editorial schedule. I may include it in a review post or possibly a book list post in the future.

I haven’t read a lot of short stories but the ones I enjoyed the most have concise punchy plots with thought-provoking themes and circumstances that stop and make you think. They invoke emotion, can make you scared, they leave an impression. Unfortunately with Pure Hollywood I wasn’t giving that for me. I struggled to read some of the stories because of the way that they have been constructed, I had to re-read paragraphs because I didn’t understand what was happening. I’m a seasoned reader and I struggled with the writing style. There were some absolute gem sentences surrounded by things that didn’t seem to make sense to me. I also noticed some of the stories had the same formula; a male and female going through the motions of something, but there was never really a beginning middle and end there was no real pivotal moment, there was no shoe dropping you just seem to be a section out of someone’s life that wasn’t the particularly interesting. They felt like very dull sections out of someone’s life who is fairly uninteresting.

I really wanted to enjoy pure Hollywood, but it was more of a chore than a pleasure to read. I think the author would be an excellent poet but perhaps short stories are not the right genre for them. I would like to thank netgalley for the opportunity to read and wish the author the best of luck with the publication

I didn't really feel that way about Christine Schutt's new collection, Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories . She's definitely a talented writer, and her use of imagery is tremendously poetic. But I found her writing style a bit evasive, so it was difficult for me to understand the characters' motivations, what was happening to them and why, and, at times, whether or not I should sympathize with them.

This is the first time I’ve read a book by acclaimed novelist and short story writer Christine Schutt, but she has a disarming and fascinating way of writing about self-consciousness, family and the passage of time. “Pure Hollywood” is a collection of short stories with the title story also being the longest. It’s an impressionistic tale of a brother and sister after the sister’s much older husband dies. He was a wealthy famous comedian, but she soon finds she’s shut out of any substantial inheritance and she’s forced to vacate the modernist home she inhabited like an abstract painting. The odd series of events which make up her life feel as if they’ve been crafted in a Hollywood film script so she forms an odd emotional distance from her own sense of being. This is a feeling that recurs throughout many of the stories in this book where the enormity of characters’ loves and losses have a sense of being scripted and so they are abstracted out of the personal. What’s left is the sordid and grimy reality that they inhabit like bemused spectators blinking in the sunlight after spending too long in a dark movie theatre.

The stories include a range of characters from an affluent young couple on holiday to men purchasing flowers for a garden to a widow harangued by her daughters about her growing drinking habit. But almost all the characters are accompanied by some sense of personal loss whether it’s a spouse or child. Gardens also frequently feature in the stories so running alongside these deaths are a proliferation of plants and flowers growing with stubborn insistence. Tied into this surrounding life is a sense of eroticism, but the presence of gardens isn’t necessarily comforting or benign. In ‘The Duchess of Albany’ it’s stated “The garden was not genteel.”  In fact, two of the stories refer to the surrounding flora as “thuggish” as if they are mocking or bullying these survivors. Gardens must be tended and cared for, but also controlled and wrangled with just like the people in these characters’ unruly lives. The result is a bewitching mingling of imagery and sensations about how our relationships grow beautifully, but soon wilt or threaten to restrictively entangle us.

It’s interesting how some of the stories slip into the surreal. The story ‘Where You Live, When You Need Me?’ about a woman named Ella who is employed by a number of affluent mothers to care for their children is particularly intriguing. The narrator reports how this child carer is much trusted, but no one knows much about her. At the same time as Ella appears the body parts of unknown children start being found in KFC buckets. The story has a high-pitched unsettling edge while not giving any conclusions. It strongly reminded me of Schweblin’s anxiety-inducing novel “Fever Dream”. The shortest stories in this collection seem to be the ones where Schutt also takes the most narrative risks in a way which doesn’t always feel successful or satisfying. Yet these micro stories also left some unsettling concepts lingering in my mind such as ‘Family Man’ where a husband living a remote “country-quiet life” feels that “The past sleds behind him.” But, on the whole, it feels like longer stories allow Schutt the space to develop characters that will resonate more powerfully such as an imperious rich old horse rider named Mrs Pall-Meyer or an irascible highly sexed famous painter named Gordon. On the whole I enjoyed these stories which have a vertiginous power to disorient their reader and articulate the peculiar subtleties of conflicting emotions.

A book that weaves many tales of many characters who can be classified as nothing less than Flawsome!  Great stories, great writing

I really wanted to like this book - that cover! - but I could never get into it. It felt like there was too much character backstory, and nothing really happened in the stories.

I'm sorry I could only get half way into this book. It made no sense and just as you get into one story it ends. Thanks for letting me have the chance.

Cherie'

I should have known when I saw this book was blurbed by Otessa Moshfegh that I wouldn't like this book. I really disliked Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick for Another World and they were similar to the stories in this collection, although I don't have the same hatred of Pure Hollywood as I do for Homesick. Mostly I'm just wondering about these collections: what is the point?

Sometimes short story collections have themes that draw all the stories together. I honestly couldn't find one here. Other than the flat out disgusting parts. What is it with contemporary authors feeling it necessary to describe penises and genitals and sexual desire in the ugliest of terms and in the most unnecessary of situations?? The person will be sitting on the sofa and will be like "and then I remembered the first time he showed me that secret, red velvet part of him. he grabbed it and said this was for me and stroked himself between my thighs." and then will go back to having a conversation about pie. Like??? completely unnecessary and just disgusting. 

I think I liked maybe one story throughout this whole thing called "The Hedges" but one out of maybe 14 just isn't enough. And most of these are short, barely a page long which makes it really, really hard to connect to a story. It's why most of these short stories failed. 

All in all, I felt like this book was rushed to market, because the stories in it were not the best. I also feel like the writing in this was sloppy, because in most stories you could barely tell what was going on. I should have known when the rating was so slow before I began this that it was not going to be a good read. I absolutely cannot recommend Pure Hollywood.

I was unable to finish this book and thus will not be posting a full review on my blog.  The language of this book was stilted, hard to follow and boring.  I found that the POV was weird and I couldn't tell what character was driving the action, at times.  Thank you for your consideration to allow me to review this book.

A collection of short stories is always a somewhat tricky proposition, with any collection I expect to find something of a mixed bag, some stories to like and some I will be less keen on. In the case of Pure Hollywood I can honestly say there was only one story I felt any real connection with. namely the tragic "The Hedges"I think I really struggled with the author's writing style, at times strangely verbose, and at others staccato and almost abrupt, and with a lot of repetition throughout. Some of the "stories" felt more like a scene or sketch lifted from a larger work, strangely incomplete in themselves but there was some cohesion in the collection as a whole, most notably the sense of isolation and the importance of appearance , which ties in well with the title of the book.

Unfortunately, this book wasn’t for me.  I couldn’t finish it.

Pure Hollywood isn't glitzy or full of glamour. There's no flashbulb or red carpets. Instead, this collection is full of death and heartache. A young widow, a mother who can't connect with her child, a mysterious woman who cares for a neighborhood of children...these are stories of tragedy.

Christine Schutt is a talented writer who captures the dirty parts of life. These aren't stories for a casual reader. There is a darkness in each one.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is the type of book that has no middle ground: you either love it or you hate it. Unfortunately, Pure Hollywood wasn’t for me, but I can see why people would enjoy this short story collection. 

The stories had a lot of potential, and this book requires a lot of reading between the lines, which is something that I love about short stories. 

However, the writing style is what really made this book difficult for me to read. Christine Schutt's style was overly repetitive to the point where the stories were difficult to follow and understand.  

Most of these short stories were originally published in literary magazines, and I see how her stories could stand out and do really well in that medium. However, having to read all of the stories in her collection in the same writing style got to be too much. (If you are interested in reading this book, I recommend reading it over the course of several months.)

The way scenes were described made everything feel on the same level. For example, in the story A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda's Garden, one of the main characters hits an animal with her car, but the writing makes this feel like the most mundane thing in the world. 

Additionally, all the characters seem to meander through life with little to no feelings. Each story gets progressively shorter, which gave me even less time to get to know and understand the characters. 

My favorite story in the collection was the title story that follows a young female whose older rich husband has died. She's faced with the reality that all of his money is going to his children, and she has to figure out what to do with her life. 

While I thought the book would focus on different characters living in Hollywood, it more so focuses on this theme of gardeners and gardening. Each story kept on bring up this idea of gardening as a metaphor for the ideal life and something just out of the characters' reach. And that's something I did enjoy about Schutt's collection. 

Overall, this book had a lot of potential to be wonderful, but the writing style felt too abrasive, and therefore, I couldn't get into the stories as much as I wanted.

this book unfortunately was not for me and did not finish.

I just finished this anthology a week ago and literally can’t remember anything I read. To be honest, I basically forgot the whole thing as soon as I finished. None of the stories really stuck with me, and I couldn’t empathize or relate to any of the characters. The anthology was well written and well edited, just didn’t turn out to be even remotely my cuppa.

Received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.