BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES 2009

Name: BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES 2009
Author: Mary Gaitskill
ISBN: 978-0-15-603431-9

edited by Mary Gaitskill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2008

Gaitskill’s selections are surprisingly quiet—there are no shock-value moments, just painstakingly good prose, fine plotting...

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An outstanding celebration of short fiction culled from writing workshops across America.

Now in its ninth year, the series has truly found its stride with guest editor Gaitskill. Her selections orbit loosely around a theme of displacement, which gives the collection a cohesion that is often lacking in “Best Of” anthologies. In many of the stories, this theme is glaring. In “Wintering,” a Russian teenager is sent away from her beachside home to live with her grandfather in Siberia while her mother serves out a prison sentence. In “Salvation Army,” an Iranian teacher who has fled to Massachusetts with her two sons contemplates the dismal fate of her former students as she tries to raise her now American children with humility and honor. Other narrators find themselves out of place in their own homes: “Weather Enough” introduces a young man who has returned from Chicago to his small Wisconsin town after his brother’s death and understands, when he spends time with a fellow mourner, that he no longer belongs there; “Welcome Home” follows a soldier who returns to his wife in Nebraska after a tour of duty in Iraq and cannot settle into a domestic routine, shaken by the humiliation that he had never been able to fire his gun in combat. For some of the characters, the idea of home is more complicated. The narrator of “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” for example, is a young writer struggling with his material, particularly when faced with his family’s refugee history.

Gaitskill’s selections are surprisingly quiet—there are no shock-value moments, just painstakingly good prose, fine plotting and efficiently drawn characters.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-15-603431-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DEVIL'S TREASURE
by Mary Gaitskill

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS IS PLEASURE
by Mary Gaitskill

- BOOK REVIEW
SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER
by Mary Gaitskill

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MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

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Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.