Essential for every student of the short story form.
A renewal of the longtime prize-volume series, perhaps its strongest installment yet.
Leave it to guest editor Díaz, of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao fame, to make a cogent, even urgent claim for the primacy of the short story without resorting to academic fancy-pantsness: “Novels might be able to summon entire worlds, but few literary forms can match the story at putting a reader in touch with life’s fleeting, inexorable rhythm.” Vita brevis, so ars brevis, then. Díaz opens with a wonderfully self-effacing memoir concerning his own checkered successes as a short story writer before turning over the stage to a fine roster of writers, most in midcareer. If there’s a shared preoccupation here, it would be that very vita-brevis business; many of the pieces touch on death, sometimes head-on, as with John Edgar Wideman’s perfectly paced “Williamsburg Bridge” (“Dawns on me that I’ll miss the next Olympics, next March Madness, next Super Bowl. Dawns on me that I won’t regret missing them”), and sometimes a touch more obliquely, as with Louise Erdrich’s eccentric but chilling “The Flower” (“Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held her foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth”). When not outright cemeteries, the settings of many pieces are clinics, dark woods, and rec rooms where 9/11 is the theme of conversation. These are, in the main, then, sober-minded pieces, marked by tears and angst and confusion, the stuff of life indeed. There’s no whiff of political correctness to the choices, which stand out entirely on their own, but even so it has to be said that Díaz’s compilation is the most diverse and inclusive entry to date of any of the major annual story collections—reason enough to get it in the classroom, and a good vehicle for readers to see what’s up in neighborhoods they may not be familiar with.
Essential for every student of the short story form.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-58275-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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