View ☆ Middle Men: Stories PDF by ☆ Jim Gavin eBook or Kindle ePUB free

Poor middle men. What's the first thing you think of to complete this sentence? Let's --------- the middle men. Yup, eliminate! Or cut out!

These short stories are drama, not comedy. All deal with men in the middle of the pack. Maybe it's the basketball team that they're so-so at. Or they graduated from college but have failure to launch. Or they launched, but crash landed. Or they're middle aged and realized this is as far as they're going to go. They must be lucky at cards because they're unlucky at love.

The title comes from a story (in the middle as another reviewer points out!) where a guy sees two versions of himself--the young fraud and the old pro--and he's currently standing in the middle.

As others are doing, I'm reading this paper version that I bought from a library book sale (remember those?) years ago and moved...another one off my TBR list.

See, he doesn't look too happy.



1451649312 No one aspires to be a “middle man” â€" a low-paid assistant, a traveling salesman, a boy who lingers on the cusp of basketball greatness. Jim Gavin’s eight stories all focus on a man who knows, deep down inside, that he will not exit the world in a blaze of glory but gamely takes what life has to offer.

The term is defined in â€" predictably â€" one of the middle stories entitled Elephant doors. Jim Gavin writes, “He imagined the two versions of himself â€" the young fraud and the old proâ€"standing on either side of a dark chasm. If there was some blessed third version of himself, the middle man who could bridge the gap, Adam saw no trace of him in the darkness.”

So the question becomes: how does one bridge the gap? Sometimes, the answer is just to get into the game. Sixteen-year-old Pat Linehan â€" whose family is desperate for him to win a college basketball scholarship â€" ends up playing for a ragtag second-string team in high school. When the school is predictably defeated, Pat “felt a miraculous sense of relief because I knew it was all over, my future.” Yet at the same time he “felt something rising in me, a sense of life, maybe.”

In one of my favorites, Bermuda, a young penniless man named Brian chases a flawed older woman, Karen, to Bermuda to somehow get some closure or arrange some resolution. Despite the fact that Karen signals strongly to Brian that the romance is now over, he reflects, “I wanted her to disappear around a corner, so it would be too late. I’d have an excuse for not doing what I wanted.”

And, in the aforementioned Elephant Doors, lowly assistant Adam panders to the studio mogul, Max, only to discover that the whole game is really meaningless and empty. By the end, “his plan was to sit there all night, drinking and cheering and listening to all the other souls who, like him, depended on the incorruptible spirit of El Goof.”

In the excellent eponymously titled story, we meet Matt â€" who spends some years nursing his dying mother. Gavin writes, “After she died, Matt, for his pain and loss, felt entitled to many rewards. He secretly anticipated, in no particular order, a moment of spiritual transcendence, the touch of a beautiful and understanding woman, and some kind of financial windfall. Instead, at thirty, he was broke and living at home.”

These are men who are frozen in their inertia, yearning for something in life but resistant to actually taking hold of it. They are unwilling to bow down to the future of their fathers, yet they are way too tentative to map out an alternative future of their own. In ways, they are stuck, but curiously, not unhappy.

Some of these stories are stronger than others and the same theme framework reverberates through the majority of the stories. It’s a good â€" but not great â€" collection that bodes well for this debut author.

224 I rarely read books of short stories, but this was great! The stories are about guys in their 20s who are flailing. Fucking up. They're funny, sad, and insightful. (Both the stories and the characters.) Very enjoyable. 224 This set of short stories took me completely by surprise, and Gavin's writing totally swept me off my feet. I got caught up in the first story of the basketball hopeful, and it wasn't hard to keep going after that.

There is such a strong sense of place, which is evident in everything from the long freeway drives to the frequency that his characters go to Del Taco. Is Del Taco a SoCal thing? Anyway, the writing powerfully conveys certain emotions in each story, which highlight the middle-ness of the character's situations. Some are in the middle of grief, denial, mediocrity, but all are so in the middle. It's really brilliant--the truly strong sense of middle-ness that the stories convey.

The writing was powerful in its simplicity. You can feel so much meaning in the little details- from the gimp mask in Illuminati to the lizard at the bottom of the pool in Costello. Once you start feeling this . . . it's no wonder that Jim Gavin is a fabulous writer. All these little details build up to convey those emotions and poignant moments in the glimpse we get of the character's life. Understated is the perfect word to describe this feeling. Understated but overwhelming and incredibly sympathetic, is what you can feel from reading this. I also particularly relished the snap with which each story ended. I don't read this kind of fiction often, but now he has me completely sold on it.

http://enjoyabookblog.com Middle Men: Stories Jim Gavin's debut collection of short fiction could as well be called Down and out in greater Los Angeles. But even Down and Out in Paris and London had a George Orwell, who later went to write Animal Farm and 1984, immortalizing his name even for those who do no read. Gavin's stories don't have heroes that get written about or who write about themselves: they have the eponymous middle men, people who are not quite at the bottom but at the same time quite far away from the top.

These stories don't have much of a narrative arc, just like the lives of their protagonists don't have any particular direction. These men, young and old, live day by day in a curious state of permanent suspension: they're hanging in some sort of a limbo, between their hopes and dreams of achieving success and fear of messing up big time and losing everything.

Gavin's characters travel along the endless freeways of hazy southern California, the hazy place where everything seems to be possible but at the same time remains in the distance, out of reach. They try their hands at becoming the local success stories in baseball or stand-up comedy, but mostly live their days from job to job, under constant sunshine. They are lost and without any real role models or people to admire - as displayed by the hopeless basketball coach in the first story, Play The Man. How can the young protagonist ever achieve success at basketball if he has no one from whom he can take any real advice from? Gavin's men meet only phonies, frauds and kooks - as illustrated by the interaction between the protagonist and the famous talk-show host in Elephant Doors - or others who are just as lost as them. They become stuck in a depressing inertia, unable to find Reuther way to opportunity trough all the haze - settling down to take what they can, understanding that they will never play the first ball, amuse the audience on national television or perform for thousands on a great stage. They all seem to be waiting for someone or something to arrive to save them, and stop their lives from being an exercise in futility - but it never happens. And so they go on, baked by the golden state's endless sunshine, walking step by step on its cracked pavements, driving mile by mile on its endless and evermerging freeways.

These stories scream autobiography from every page - Gavin is a native of Orange County, and was shaped by the same environment and communities that he describes - and together form a well-written debut collection. Still, the reader might wish for a bit more of a narrative cohesion and plot, which will hopefully arrive with the author's debut novel.

In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. In Play the Man a high-school basketball player aspires to a college scholarship, in Elephant Doors, a production assistant on a game show moonlights as a stand-up comedian, and in the collection’s last story, the immensely moving “Costello”, a middle-aged plumbing supplies salesman comes to terms with the death of his wife. The men in Gavin’s stories all find themselves stuck somewhere in the middle, caught half way between their dreams and the often crushing reality of their lives. A work of profound humanity that pairs moments of high comedy with searing truths about life’s missed opportunities, Middle Men brings to life a series of unforgettable characters learning what it means to love and work and be in the world as a man, and it offers our first look at a gifted writer who has just begun teaching us the tools of his trade. Middle Men: Stories

A great read, and not just for those of us mourning the (apparent) end of Lodge 49. Middle Men: Stories Bookended by two strong stories that capture the Lodge 49 spirit. Jim Gavin is so good at illustrating the dignity of people bonded by illegal cable and unconsolidated debt. “Elephant Doors” is the only whiff, reminding me of the worst stuff from The Girl with Curious Hair. (Sorry if that’s your thing)

Lynx forever. 224 This is one of those books that makes you vibrate inside and find parts of yourself on every page. Gavin takes everyday life in SoCal and takes a hard but compassionate look at ordinary people. You will find no heroes here but you will find those who finish the marathon of working for a living with honor and love in their hearts. You will find people you want to hug and those you want to tell to fuck off. Very often I knew exactly what the author was trying to say and identified closely with many of the sad situations the young men face in the stories. I have been to the Luau and this writer made it so very real. This is a wonderful collection and I haven't enjoyed such as much since Winesburg Ohio. Hardcover This is one of those collections of short stories that starts off running and just keeps going. Each entry involves a resident of California, a man who is trying to make it against the odds. Most are set in the Los Angeles area, and provide an insider's view of life in and around the fringes of The Business. Gavin has held some of the positions he describes here, and his story about the escapades of a production assistant (aka gofer) on Jeopardy! is truly hilarious. These are well crafted stories with a three dimensional aspect that could stand on their own as material for longer works. The material and characterizations are uniformly rich and satisfying. Jim Gavin Got my hands on an ARC of this spectacular first book about Southern California and being human. Hilarious, smart, sad, true. Comes out in February. I can't recommend this highly enough. Middle Men: Stories