by Alyson Hagy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2010
Hagy’s images of Wyoming are a bit too muted to be fully engaging, but her writing is consistently provocative and informed.
An assortment of carefully tuned stories marked by hauntings, curious incidents and hard Western landscapes.
As the title suggests, few strange spirits appear in the fourth collection of short fiction by Hagy (Keeneland, 2000, etc.). But she’s less interested in conjuring scares than in studying how fear and the feelings of isolation unique to Wyoming affect the lives of her characters. “The Sin Eaters,” the book’s longest and final story, follows a preacher arriving from Iowa in 1889 to serve as a missionary for the Shoshone Indians; his travels are marked by a few lessons in area folklore (like the titular sin eaters, spirits that cleanse the bodies of the newly dead) and a glimpse of the violence that suggests that white homesteaders need his attention more than the natives. Most of the stories, though, are set in present-day Wyoming, and Hagy has a knack for conveying the ominous emptiness of the state as well as showing how small twists of fate spin into larger dramas. “How Bitter the Weather” is narrated by a young newspaper reporter trying to locate a missing local man of Romani descent, and her efforts open up conversations about Gypsy superstitions and her own romantic conflicts. “Border” follows a man hoping to make a quick buck stealing a prize border collie, an experience that reveals others’ cruelty and his own gullibility. Hagy’s prose is generally measured and restrained, bordering on grim, but she’s not without a sense of humor: In “Superstitions of the Indians” she pits a snarky graduate student against the ghost of a woman who haunts the library where he works, and the story functions as both a light satire of academia and a lament for the Native-American culture moldering in the stacks. The author is on shakier ground when she experiments with structure, as in “Brief Lives of the Trainmen,” a series of snapshots of railroad workers in the 1860s, but the more successful “Oil & Gas” shows how encroaching corporate interests reshape residents’ lives.
Hagy’s images of Wyoming are a bit too muted to be fully engaging, but her writing is consistently provocative and informed.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55597-548-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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by Louis L’Amour ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 1999
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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