by Frederic Tuten ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2010
Some readers will find these stories repetitive and aridly arty. But the dialogue is witty and erudite, the style lapidary,...
The latest from Tuten, one of the gray eminences of the American avant-garde (The Green Hour, 2002, etc.), is a collection of enigmatic and interconnected stories about love, death, myth and memory.
Most of these meditative fictions feature two principal characters, a first-person narrator—sometimes a painter or an art critic, always exquisitely sensitive, worldly, prone to allude to myth, literature, music and the visual arts—and a woman who’s a sort of shape-shifting Eternal Beloved. Over and again, in exotic places and in circumstances often tinged with dream-logic or Borgesian whimsy, they meet and spar and touch and (often) part. In “Self Portrait with Circus,” a lovelorn ringmaster vies with the strongman for the heart of his wire-walking love (and is consoled in his heartache by the wise, dignified elephants); in “The Park Near Marienbad,” a lonely art critic, still grieving his long-dead wife, eavesdrops on a young couple’s cafe repartee and tries to write himself into their story, and thus back into his own. “Self Portrait with Icebergs” ends with a schooner “like a burning fruit encased in ice” steaming down Avenue B toward the Narrows and then the open sea, bound for Antarctica; “Self Portrait with Cheese” is a surrealist fever dream; in “The Park on Fire,” a man leaves his wife reading in a hotel and embarks on a stroll in the park that becomes a trip through an inferno, the tour led this time not by Virgil but by Federico García Lorca.
Some readers will find these stories repetitive and aridly arty. But the dialogue is witty and erudite, the style lapidary, and there are moments of elegiac lyricism to rival Tuten’s great Tintin in the New World (1993).Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-07905-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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