by Christine Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1996
Bell follows her two novels (Saint, 1985; The Perez Family, 1990) with a first collection of nine stories that limn the quirks and quandaries of the human heart with sympathy and a wry sense of the absurd. The characters here come from the striving lower class where respectability, while often desired, must always contend with somber economic realities and unexpected tragedy. In the title story, a young woman living with her handicapped aunt and their maid, believing that every seven years we change the atoms of our body, is ready for ``real First Love'' again. She finds and loses it but along the way makes money by feeding false gossip about royalty to the tabloids. Another tale, ''A Pillow and a Rock,'' gives Elvis Presley a twin brother, presumed dead at birth but saved by the midwife who gave him to a childless couple. In ``Nashville Night,'' a still-grieving mother recalls the summer she nursed her dying daughter, who wasn't exactly ``mean but was still a long way from the sweetness that invites disease.'' Saved by a stranger from a marauding gang who later kill a woman at the same place, a wife and mother (in ``Cliff from Chicago, Annie McDermott, and Me'') can't forget the sheer randomness of the incident. The young woman protagonist of ``A Good Thief,'' sentenced to do community service at a home for the retarded, doesn't exactly reform but learns after a bungled robbery with one of the inmates in tow that she ``wasn't as good a thief as she thought.'' And in a whimsical change of pace, ``Mockingbird'' relates how a noted sound sleeper lost and then regained his wife, who had left him to find a good night's rest. Affecting and unpretentiously original: a quiet delight.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03945-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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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