THE PEN/O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2012

Name: THE PEN/O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2012
Author: Laura Furman
ISBN: 978-0-307-94788-8

edited by Laura Furman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2012

Overall a strong and welcome collection, though readers on a limited anthology budget will find the annual edition of the...

bookshelf

Latest edition of the annual short-fiction prize volume, of more consistently high quality than several other volumes of recent vintage.

The good news: The era of aping Ray Carver, 25 years on, seems to be over. There’s more good news: To judge by Furman’s choices, no one has figured out how to imitate David Foster Wallace, and the cutesy po-mo stuff seems to be ebbing, too. Still and all, we’re reminded of a question asked by an earnest poet not long ago: Does the American public care about anything less than poetry? Yes, and that’s the short story, the province of a tiny number of highbrow magazines and an ever-growing number of writers’ workshops, hardly read outside of those rarified circles. There’s more good news: several of Furman’s choices could turn the tide, given wider circulation. Wendell Berry’s “Nothing Living Lives Alone,” with its encouraging, manifesto-like title, is alone worth the price of admission; originally published in The Threepenny Review, it’s long and leisurely, like a winding country lane in the southern backwoods of which Berry is our greatest bard (“The town of Hargrave, charmed by its highway and motor connections to everywhere else, thought itself somewhat worldly”). The collection’s single most impressive tour de force falls just a few paragraphs shy of being a novella, that form beloved of Jim Harrison and a few other contemporary writers, and it comes from an outside-turned-insider, Beijing-born Yiyun Li, whose “Kindness” turns on a “forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers.” The whole history of late 20th-century China lies in miniature in her closely written pages. Other standouts are Dagoberto Gilb’s opener, “Uncle Rock,” in which a young boy tries to comprehend the world and its summum bonum, namely baseball, and Miroslav Penkov’s Balkans morality tale “East of the West.”

Overall a strong and welcome collection, though readers on a limited anthology budget will find the annual edition of the Pushcart Prize to offer more bang for the buck.

Pub Date: April 17, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-94788-8

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2019
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2018
edited by Laura Furman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES 2017
edited by Laura Furman

bookshelf

VINELAND

by Thomas Pynchon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1990

bookshelf

If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.

Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.

Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990

ISBN: 0141180633

Page Count: 385

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHADOW TICKET
by Thomas Pynchon

- BOOK REVIEW
BLEEDING EDGE
by Thomas Pynchon

- BOOK REVIEW
INHERENT VICE
by Thomas Pynchon

- PERSPECTIVES
This Thomas Pynchon Novel Deserves a Fresh Look

bookshelf

JURASSIC PARK

by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990

bookshelf

Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.