BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES 2009

Name: BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES 2009
Author: Mary Gaitskill
ISBN: 978-0-15-603431-9

edited by Mary Gaitskill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2008

Gaitskill’s selections are surprisingly quiet—there are no shock-value moments, just painstakingly good prose, fine plotting...

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An outstanding celebration of short fiction culled from writing workshops across America.

Now in its ninth year, the series has truly found its stride with guest editor Gaitskill. Her selections orbit loosely around a theme of displacement, which gives the collection a cohesion that is often lacking in “Best Of” anthologies. In many of the stories, this theme is glaring. In “Wintering,” a Russian teenager is sent away from her beachside home to live with her grandfather in Siberia while her mother serves out a prison sentence. In “Salvation Army,” an Iranian teacher who has fled to Massachusetts with her two sons contemplates the dismal fate of her former students as she tries to raise her now American children with humility and honor. Other narrators find themselves out of place in their own homes: “Weather Enough” introduces a young man who has returned from Chicago to his small Wisconsin town after his brother’s death and understands, when he spends time with a fellow mourner, that he no longer belongs there; “Welcome Home” follows a soldier who returns to his wife in Nebraska after a tour of duty in Iraq and cannot settle into a domestic routine, shaken by the humiliation that he had never been able to fire his gun in combat. For some of the characters, the idea of home is more complicated. The narrator of “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” for example, is a young writer struggling with his material, particularly when faced with his family’s refugee history.

Gaitskill’s selections are surprisingly quiet—there are no shock-value moments, just painstakingly good prose, fine plotting and efficiently drawn characters.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-15-603431-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DEVIL'S TREASURE
by Mary Gaitskill

- BOOK REVIEW
THIS IS PLEASURE
by Mary Gaitskill

- BOOK REVIEW
SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER
by Mary Gaitskill

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.