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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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.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.