bookshelf

PRIZE STORIES 2000

Name: PRIZE STORIES 2000
Author: Larry Dark
ISBN: 0-385-49877-2

THE O. HENRY AWARDS

edited by Larry Dark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2000

The few historical stories, while a welcome change, seem mostly warm-ups for bigger works; in any case, the 80th edition of...

bookshelf

Dark’s perfunctory introduction to this year’s collection is right about one thing: there are a lot of deaths in the 20 stories selected by judges Michael Cunningham, Pam Houston, and George Saunders.

Tim Gautreaux, now a staple of such anthologies, strikes the one humorous note in the volume that gives top honors to John Wideman’s meditation on his mother’s death, a somber, almost schmaltzy, blues riff. Just when you thought, though, that it was safe to read annual anthologies without encountering Raymond Carver or his epigones, the editors include a posthumous piece by the daddy of minimalism himself, a tiresome tale of a dried-out alcoholic who renews himself after chopping a few chords of wood. The Atlantic Monthly, represented with three stories, wins the magazine honors, and Mary Gordon’s “The Deacon” well merits its third prize: it’s a smart profile of a righteous modern nun who learns the true meaning of loving those who we’re inclined not to. Melissa Pritchard’s “Salve Regina” also tangles with the church: a non-Catholic girl attends a convent school and sublimates her confused sexuality into passionate faith. Religion figures quite differently in Nathan Englander’s tale of a gentile investment banker who suddenly decides one day that he’s an Orthodox Jew, a decision with devastating practical consequences for his shiksa wife. But death sustains the longest note here: in Russell Banks’s “Plain of Abraham,” a construction foreman inadvertently causes the death of his former wife; in John Biguenet’s poignant “Rose,” a woman keeps a folder of computer-generated physical updates on her long-dead son; in Kate Walbert’s “The Gardens of Kyoto,” a woman remembers a cousin killed in the South Pacific; and in Alice Dark’s “Watch the Animals,” a snooty community comes together to respect and honor its most eccentric member as her death approaches.

The few historical stories, while a welcome change, seem mostly warm-ups for bigger works; in any case, the 80th edition of this fine series serves its basic function: it’s a window into the world of contemporary fiction.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000

ISBN: 0-385-49877-2

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY PRIZE
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2002
edited by Larry Dark

- BOOK REVIEW
PRIZE STORIES 2001
edited by Larry Dark

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.