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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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