Fourteen black women write of racism and exploitation, passing southern folkways, social and color discrimination within the black community, and love and corruption among upper-class whites—all in styles that range from romantic melodrama to social realism, irony to broad humor. Many of the 28 stories here—written during the flowering of black literary culture in the 20's and 30's and most published originally in African-American magazines (The Crisis, Opportunity, etc.)—have never before been reprinted. For those who know Harlem Renaissance names like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen without having found examples of their work, Knopf's anthology provides a convenient introduction, although—perhaps typical for magazine fiction—many of the pieces are less valuable as literature than for what they reveal about the cultural context. Dorothy West writes affectingly of family situations impinged upon by racial issues. In Marita Bonner's more tragic vision, the narrator of ``One Boy's Story'' plays out a bloody, mythic drama. Leila Amos Pendleton's uneducated protagonist insists Socrates (``Sockertees'') and Cleopatra (``Clea Patrick'') were black; in spite of the Afrocentric vision, her dialect stories would probably not pass muster today. The ``wonder-quality of her soul'' can't stop Angelina Weld GrimkÇ's tragic Agnes from a desperate act of violence. Zora Neale Hurston's ``John Redding Goes to Sea,'' written while Hurston was an undergraduate at Howard, confirms her critical standing by showing her youthful skill and talent. Editor Knopf (Univ. of Wisconsin) also provides historical background, brief bios for 11 authors; her discussion of the fiction rarely goes beyond summary and sometimes reveals surprise endings. Not always a great read, but the only anthology of its kind.
Pub Date: May 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-8135-1944-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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