A must-have collection for writers and readers alike: for readers because of the high-quality prose, and for writers because...
Another winning installment of the nearly century-old prize volume.
One day some enterprising scholar will take the O. Henry Prize anthologies and use them as the basis for a synoptic study of changes in the themes and styles of the American short story. Until that day, a few gross generalizations emerge: The day of minimalism has passed, although a few writers remain under Raymond Carver’s sway; conversations in short stories are seldom as direct as they are in plays, and most of the time people wind up talking past each other; and if short stories are vignettes, manageable slices of life, then life can be awfully damned dreary: “Carl is helping her peel potatoes with another cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Dylan drinks from a can of Guinness.” In short stories, people often behave as they’re stereotypically supposed to—Irish people drink, working-class people argue, rich people stare vacantly—but just as often don’t, and subverting expectations is the hallmark of the best of these pieces. Among the standouts are Olivia Clare’s uncannily timely “Pétur,” set in an ash-covered valley with 86 permanent Icelandic residents and a clutch of existentially uncertain Americans (“She felt nineteen, mostly. She looked fifty”); David Bradley’s neatly compact portrait of family memory as it plays out in the jumbled hills of Pennsylvania, on “rough, recondite roads—Pinchots, he called them—that snaked through gloomed forests before bursting into sunlit coves”; and William Trevor’s terse study “The Women,” with its densely packed opening: “Growing up in the listless 1980s, Cecilia Normanton knew her father well, her mother not at all.” The volume’s best story among a field of strong contenders, though, may be Louise Erdrich’s “Nero,” a fine contribution to the nearly forgotten tragic-dog-story genre.
A must-have collection for writers and readers alike: for readers because of the high-quality prose, and for writers because of the trade secrets tucked away in the commentaries.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-80731-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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