That rarest and most refreshing sort of short story anthology: an eye-opener.
Gripping anthology of the unexpected from a cabal of A-list authors—but don’t look for their names in the table of contents.
Inspired by a demolition-derby driver who always won because he drove like he had nothing to lose, editor Parent (Turning Stones, 1996, etc.) cajoled a batch of star scribblers, from Michael Connelly and Alice Sebold to Sebastian Junger and Rosie O’Donnell, to contribute short stories anonymously, freeing them from the sometimes weighty expectations their names can bring. The results run the gamut from stunningly good to just plain okay to embarrassing. Of the middle category are such page-fillers as “An Eye for an Eye,” a portrait of a strained marriage that’s as finely crafted as it is bloodless and rote. “A Country Like No Other” is something quite different. It follows a pair of young American journalists through the ragged edges of a West African conflict packed full of everyday horror and the banality of evil. The story’s world-weariness somehow feels fresh, as though the naïve writer and his jaundiced, cynical buddy weren’t a trope as old as the hills. Another standout is “Wonderland,” which seems to have Alice Sebold’s name all over it. In this sharp shock of a piece, a shallow New York fashion magazine editor recollects her college affair with a Puerto Rican janitor and the tragedy that brought her and the man’s young daughter together. Simultaneously wistful, hateful, funny, honest and utterly self-serving, it’s a damning portrait of class prejudice that any writer would be smart to want to claim as her own.
That rarest and most refreshing sort of short story anthology: an eye-opener.Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6264-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Plaudits for the concept of a woman pursuing and getting her intellectual equal, but, here, gabby and relentlessly high-minded lovers turn Rush's first novel (after the story collection, Whites, 1986) into a meeting of true minds with too long an agenda. When a 30-ish unnamed American woman discovers that her anthropological thesis, which she had come to research in Botswana, is invalid, she decides to be ``hedonic, think passim about my life and next steps'' and ``repose in the white utopia Gaborone was.'' Which she does until she meets the legendary Nelson Denoon, guru of rural development, preacher of a third way for African countries, and rumored to be in charge of a distant village, Tsau, run by and for women. Intrigued by his brilliance and reputation, the woman sets off alone across the Botswana desert, nearly dying in the attempt but finally reaching Tsau. The village is the vehicle for Denoon's ideas about women (``Every female is a golden loom''), religion (religious buildings are banned in Tsau), education, solar power, and just about everything else. The love affair— exhaustively annotated and dissected all in the first person—is inevitable, and though they make agreeable love and though Denoon is all that he should be, it is the talk that matters—''I love your mind,'' she proclaims. They talk up a storm on everything from the ANC in South Africa to the anarchosyndicalists of Spain. But Tsau is not quite paradise—serpents exist, and Denoon himself changes after an accident in the desert, where he may have undergone a religious experience. Our heroine, disenchanted, returns to the US, but a mysterious message from Africa provokes her curiosity—she might venture another investigation of this most unusual man. In essence a love story, an unusual and credible one, with an exotic locale, and a colorful supporting cast; but the nonstop clever talk eventually provokes irritation rather than sympathy. A flawed novel of too many ideas, many good, but collectively too much.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-54472-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A simply told, warm, rather melancholy tale of changing times in the small ranch country of Texas. On old-time cowboy Grandad's ranch, old and new generations are uneasily mixed. Second wife Grandma complains and listens to the radio; her vicious son is obsessed with town, care and women. Lonnie, his grandson by the first marriage, likes Grandad, the land, life and its people, but is restless and lonely and ambiguously drawn to the easy-going Negro women, Helmea, who is the real mother of the household. Many tensions erupt and when Helmea is raped by one of the men (a terrible, pitiful scene), she leaves and the household collapses. The cattle, infected, are shot and buried by bulldozers and the old man, too, dies inside. Lonnie, at loose ends, goes off to the rodeo and returns to find Grandad in a ditch, terribly injured, later to be shot in a "mercy killing". Lonnie, finding that the old way of life is lost, sets out to drift... The isolation and the homely, tangible beauty of small ranch life removes the taint of melodrama from this tale. The people (especially Nelmas), the country, the cattle are real. Grandad's way of life is strong-and can only be killed violently - so that it is a fitting end that he meets.
Pub Date: June 15, 1961
ISBN: 068485385X
Page Count: 196
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1961
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