Even before Rose name drops Waiting for Godot and Italo Calvino, there is a sideways floatiness to these stories that calls the play and the author to mind. The narrative flair is such that there is little to grab onto, by design it is clear, to mimic the ephemerality of memory and the ways we try to preserve it through photography, film, and story. The pieces in this collection are mostly flash-fiction length and Rose makes the most of the available space. If you're looking to just vibe, this is the collection for you.

I had a great time reading this book. I love short stories and these were very thought provoking stories. I found myself putting the book down after each story to reflect on what I thought it meant and what the moral of the story was. Although the stories didn't make a lot of sense to me, I loved reading them and almost following the inner monologue of the author as they wrote about their daydreams. I found myself having to go back and reread to remember who the characters were as there were a lot of characters and many had similar names.

The art of disappearance meeting the art of finding

'Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a few words, its lambent core. This is the one line that illuminates everything, that lets us feel the story, a story of things that flicker, things that fade.'

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is an amusing, imaginative and playful collection of 19 short stories which revolve around recurrent and connected motives and themes like time, disappearance, vanishing, getting lost and found – the evanescence of things, people and words. In the story 'What remains of Claire Blanck' only the footnotes remain, the actual story they are commenting on has vanished. Nonetheless the footnotes give the impression to reflect on other stories in the collection, the blanked out words on the almost white pages illustrating the leitmotif of disappearance, emphasizing what went missing, was omitted or deleted: 'All short stories are about loss, but more, perhaps, about the traces things leave behind. All short stories are ghost stories'.. A man witnesses how his belongings and furniture are gradually disappearing from his flat (One art). A brother tries to keep an eye on his sister but cannot hold on to her (Sister).

'All these books, she said, their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.'

There is a sense of gentle enchantment to these dreamlike stories, of which some have a fabular quality ('The Neva Star,' 'Violons and pianos are horses', with a nod to Nietzsche). A few are inspired by factual material drawn from the history of film and photography, forgotten pioneers like a Hippolyte Bayard who protested against the lack of recognition he faced by staging a picture of himself as a drowned man.

'Photography is a way of creating permanence where none exists.'

Some stories – in a way perhaps all the stories - thematize the art of storytelling, reflecting on the process of writing, documenting how the aspiring short story writer correlates to the masters of the short story genre – Chekhov inevitably but also French and American and other Russian authors (Gogol, Kharms, Dovlatov, Zoshchenko ) ('A brief history on the short story': 'I wish for a skilled pen, the careful placing of each element, the timing of a slow reveal to a crushing truth'. On the moment you might pounce Borges! Carver! Rose steals your thunder and throws the name on the table himself. Rather than simply exaggerating in casual namedropping however, Rose makes it part of the fun, toying with Bergson, Walter Benjamin and St Augustine in an airy and humorous way that reminded me of the short stories of Antonio Tabucchi. Only in one – rather sweet - story I wondered about the need to give away the author of the story that is on the menu of the English language class ('Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years'). A story titled by the song 'I’m in love with a German film star' that is entirely constructed from and structured through songs made me smile. There is nothing like music from one’s younger days that can rekindle memories of strong feelings (All cats are grey, Struggle for pleasure, Four hours).

'If only life had a shape. If only life had the sense of a story.'

The titular story – an exercise in alternate history - and the focus of the art of storytelling reminded me that for a short time I had access to a digital copy of Walter Benjamin’s own fiction 'The Storyteller': Tales out of Loneliness that expired before I could read it, which in the light of Rose’s theme strikes me as apt as well as ironic. An adroit, cheerful and charming collection which is well-worth reading, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea also has the merit to rekindle my curiosity about that collection, if only to experience these acute words of Benjamin on storytelling within the text they belong: 'The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life to be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story'.

I was sold on this story collection by the quirky title and the description of the stories held within. Ultimately, I was a bit disappointed, though there were some highlights.

I'd divide the stories up into two groups: some are modern-day fairy tales, with quirky scenarios and characters; the other take real-life people (primarily scientists) and look at a glimpse of their (real or imagined life). These are not hard and fast categories. For example, many of the real-life stories have more fantastical elements; think St. Augustine browsing a Twitter feed. These are the stories that ultimately lost me. They were simply too odd for me.

However, there were some highlights. I enjoyed the story "The Disappearer", of a man who invented cinema but then disappeared. I also really liked "Arkady who couldn't see and Artem who couldn't hear", a story of two twins, one blind and one deaf, who are building a matchstick model of their childhood town. Our narrator describes their different ways of remembering their past. Their process of building replicates the process of building history or a memory, which I found fascinating.

In general, I struggle a bit with shorter short stories that just tackle a single idea and then end. Many of the stories in this collection fall into that category. I wanted fewer stories that dove more into the characters and scenario. But that is more a personal preference.

Excellent collection of short stories. I enjoyed the style, themes and writing, there’s mystery, history, real people. Many of the stories are about early photography and film, music, writing and philosophy. My favourite stories were: ‘I’m in love with German film star’ the narrators lifelong obsession with a minor actress told in songs; ‘Sister’ the narrators sister has a strange relationship with time and disappears; ‘A Brief History of the Short Story’ a comparison of the different style of French, Russian and American short stories told in three short stories, very well done!; ‘Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years’ teacher uses Maupassant’s The Necklace to teach his English language students.

I truly enjoyed this collection of literary short stories.
I love a good short story, and there were so many on this collection that got me the second they started.
Some of my favorites were
Saint Augustine Checks his Twitter Feed
Sister
The Neva Star
Arkady who couldnt see and Artem who couldn’t hear
Are they a bit random? Yes. Is that what I love about short story collections? Yes.

Thank you NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for this ARC.

Thank you NetGalley & Melville House Publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. This review is also posted on Goodreads.

A unique collection of short stories that both leave you guessing (sometimes confused) and satisfied. I'm not a huge short story fan, but I found this collection to be intriguing and engaging. While I can see some of the stories connecting together, most are stand alone tales.

Almost every story has a sci-fi or "larger than life" feel. I found that the theme of time, which can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, is at play in every short story. This alone provides an interesting message to the reader. I was left with questions, but for once, I'm not bothered by my lack of answers. I'm leaving this book intrigued and wanting to read more from C.D. Rose!

My favorite short stories from this collection:
St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed
To Athens
Things that Flicker, Things that Fade

A book of short stories that I found each unique and interesting. In my opinion, none of them made any kind of sense to put together. But reading and taking each one in individually, made the difference for me. My favorite of them all was the one by the actual title of the book. Short stories aren’t usually something I enjoy. They tend to leave me wanting more, but I really enjoyed this.

literary, weird sets of tales. one of my favorites is the one that only hints at what's going on, as it's only told through the footnotes of a tale. another favorite are the two siblings, one who can't see and one whocan't hear. thanks for the arc.

It's a bit of a stretch for the Wall Street Journal to state that Borges would have admired C.D. Rose, who is certainly an heir to his tradition. A more apt comparison, I think, would be to Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." Regardless, though, this collection is a pensive affirmation of the fact that time--while it does inexorably pass--can have its ravagings somewhat tamed by an artistic imagination.

This book was fascinating to me as someone who studied photography, a subject often mentioned, and as someone who’s in love with the act of storytelling itself.
It holds the reader’s attention to subjects that would otherwise be rather boring, such as the concepts of time, memory and visual representation.
I didn’t fall in love with every short stort, but it was an interesting read and i really liked the author’s sense of humor.
Something I believe this is lacking is the presence of some visual support, because it’s a bit frustrating when specific photographs keep getting mentioned in some short stories and you have to stop reading to go look them up.
Ironically, one of the short stories that i least liked was the one that gives the name to the book.
Some of my favorite short stories were: Arkady who couldn’t see and Artem who couldn’t hear; Sister; Trouvé and Proud Woman (...).

I enjoyed these heady short stories that revere European intellectuals, particularly Chekhov. I think I liked the first story the best, although the matchstick brothers was also memorable. Some of the more formalistic attempts were less successful to me.

When I first began reading these short stories, I thought that they were going to be slightly inaccessible to me. This is because the first few stories seem to be referencing very specific cultural times in specific types of media. I was not sure if this collection would just completely go over my head.

Towards the middle, I started to enjoy the stories more but still felt a lingering feeling of being left out. I am not sure why, though. I read books and stories set in Europe all of the time. I am not European, but I don't usually have this feeling of being left out. This was maybe the middle few stories, as I was taking a train from London to Edinburgh, after travelling some 6 hours from Newark, New Jersey.

On the return flight home, I began to really enjoy Rose's prose and the originality and experimental aspect of the stories (I don't know if you can get more meta than writing a short story about short stories). Overall, though, this collection felt a bit disjointed for me. I loved the stories set in "times before" that did truly feel like the fables. When we were dabbling in the modern era, it threw me off a bit.

I would definitely try something from C.D. Rose in the future! An expansion on the sailors or the Russian brothers, perhaps?

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Melville House Publishing for an advance copy of this collection of short stories that have the sense and sensibility of old Europe, new thoughts on old philosophies, the magic and mystery of photos and cinema, and the wispy feeling of memories that never happened, or happened to others but have become a part of the public conscious.

As a reader, and this might be a problem unique to me, I have a strange relationship with short stories. I enjoy them, and number quite a few as some of the best things I have every read. However in many cases, I am a greedy reader and I would like to know more. Genre stories I understand why they have to end. The mystery is solved, the aliens have been found, the vampire has killed all the cast. And yet I still want to know more. What happens next? Where does this go? Does this character remember what his friends look like while waiting for them to arrive at the train station? That was the only problem I had with this collection of stories by C. D. Rose Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea. They ended and I wanted to know more, and at the end of the collection I wanted more stories by this very talented writer.

The stories share a lot of similar themes. Trains, photography, cinema, art, memory and the tricks that memory plays on people. They take place in a part of the world that seems like the middle of Europe, though they range in time from between the wars, to before the wars that might come in this century. The first story Ognosia, is one of my favorites and sets the mood. A man arrives by train to interview a photographer for an article at a bar, that he realizes is pictured in the book. As he looks around, other voices take over, showing the rich series of events that could be and might be all around them, until returning to the interviewer, and the possible muse that set this up. Another story that is my favorite is about a train trip through Russia with two men, telling their lives with matchstick models, sharing their difficult youth as they build buildings from the past, and taking them down at night. A ship has been abandoned with only three crew members left, stateless and alone, sharing the food that remains on the boat as the years past. A woman finds a photo of herself in a antiques store, while waiting with her boyfriend to meet friends he hasn't seen for awhile, and doesn't remember well. Memory, the past the future, dreams photos, real people all float through this stories, sometimes leaving a trace, other times not.

A wonderful collection of stories. There are things I want to type and talk about, but I don't want to ruin people's first experience with these stories. I loved the feeling, the writing, the characters and the way Rose describes the world his character's live in. Almost a parallel universe where Europe still retains its coolness and artiness. Even with similar themes the stories are all different feeling. The mix of real people, the strange death of the possible creator of motion pictures, a philosopher watching people trade luggage while thinking of his eventual fate. These stories stayed with me. Even now I think of how much I want to take a train trip, just to see what happens, even a subway ride. Well-crafted stories that really grab readers and even when the book is finished will stay with a reader.

Recommended for those who enjoy not just good short stories, but great writing. There is a strong sense of purpose and atmosphere in these stories, like Wes Anderson movies. I have not read anything by C.D. Rose before after reading this I am a fan and can't wait for more.

I enjoyed this overall. The author has a vivid imagination, and writes well. I description was so good that my expectations may have been too high. Nonetheless, many scifi short story fans will enjoy this.

I really appreciate the free copy for review!!

i actually skipped a few of the stories here so… yeah. there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but i thought it just tried too hard to be smart & quirky and ended up coming off as a little annoying instead.

I understand that this a collection of literary fables, but I could not make heads or tales of it at all. I think often times with these types of books authors cover there lack of articulation through characterization of the book as literary. When I’m reality, it is not asking too much as a reader that a story have some flow and a through line. And in a collection of essays or stories, there ought o me a consistent theme or idea or exploration otherwise what would be the purpose of including a bunch of random disjointed stories together. Your writing is not any better and your not more intellectual because you purposefully write a story in a convoluted way. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the author is trying to say or what I am supposed to glean from any of these almost stream of consciousness stories. Not for me, not a fan.

An incredible collection of literary short-stories by C.D. Rose. The first half of the book I was unsure what I was reading and was rather irritated with the lack of flow or logic. In time, I came to realize my approach to the book was all wrong. My expectations were ill-fitting: these are explorations in story-telling by a clever and imaginative author. They are introspective thoughts on the subjective experience of time and so much more.
Each story is unique in delivery and tone. Contemplative. Slightly eerie. Seldom confusing. Often intentionally giving plenty of space for interpretation or telling you that’s exactly what they’re doing. This is a book about the art of short-story writing and Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is itself a work of art.

A view of my favorites:

1)History of the Short Story
2)Arkady Who Couldn’t See and Artem Who Couldn’t Hear
3)What remains of Claire Blanck
4)Henri Bergson Writes About Time

Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House Publishing for sharing this title with me.