by Jerome Charyn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2015
Charyn calls the work “no sentimental journey through my own traces as a child,” yet there’s a writer’s deep affection here...
Grifters, gangs, vamps, and lost souls pursue gritty lives in “the brick wilderness of the Bronx” in this collection of tales by a veteran storyteller and native of the New York borough.
The opening line, “Howell was still on the lam,” establishes a noirish tone and diction that will appear often, beginning with this tale of a man who travels the U.S. conning widows until he returns to his Bronx hometown and rediscovers an old flame. The time of the collection spans the postwar era, when New York gangs danced into West Side Story, through the sad days of the 1950s, after a Robert Moses highway split Charyn’s boyhood turf, uprooted neighborhoods, and led, in the 1970s, to the desolation of the South Bronx. Historical figures enter these little fictions, just as admitted fabrications drifted into two Charyn childhood memoirs (Bronx Boy, 2002; The Black Swan, 2000). A Diane Arbus type named Dee tries to capture in a photo the soul of the 8-foot-9-inch Eddie Carmel. Mobster Frank Costello moves in the background of a trio of stories featuring a good-looking kid who becomes a male model (“I was 15 when Rosenzweig discovered me at the Frick Collection”). In another trio, a Manhattan woman discovers where her sister vanished to at age 5 and retrieves her from a “home for alcoholic movie stars and mental patients.” Charyn’s staccato style is full of jolts, surprising observations, and turns of phrase. It works well with the rough struggle for survival and success in “the wild lands of the Bronx.” And some stories soar: in particular, the troubled romance between a plumber and an Irish nurse in “Major Leaguer,” which artfully assembles such Bronx icons as street gangs, the drug trade, Robert Moses, and the New York Yankees.
Charyn calls the work “no sentimental journey through my own traces as a child,” yet there’s a writer’s deep affection here for a world full of color and character.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-489-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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