by Michel Faber ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007
Minor work from the author of The Courage Consort (2004, etc.), though animated by a polished, oddly engaging nastiness.
Eccentrics, misfits, sociopaths and outright criminals populate the cosmopolitan (Dutch-born, now Scottish) author’s sleek, disturbing, gruesomely funny short stories.
His second collection includes 16 brisk extended vignettes whose thinly characterized protagonists are cogs in varied familial, marital and bureaucratic machines. Orwell and Kafka are channeled in the misadventure of a disoriented homeless man who foregoes recovering his forgotten past, preferring “the gift of brute shelter” offered by the regimented comforts of “The Safehouse.” A divorced father returns his young daughter home from a visit to the house he shares with his male lover, until their interrupted train journey takes them in an unanticipated direction (“All Black”). In “Andy Comes Back,” a recovered comatose patient is briefly reunited with the family who had believed him lost to them forever—before choosing the life he knows he’s now meant to live. Faber creates memorably subversive images of embattled family dynamics in the plaintive story of an unfit mother attempting to shed self-destructive addictions and reclaim her young son from foster care (“Serious Swimmers”); an ironic look at a self-absorbed father’s imagined competition with his freedom-seeking teenaged children (the title story); and a horrific conte cruel in which a beleaguered new mother serendipitously discovers how to disable her newborn’s constant demands (“The Smallness of the Action”). Faber miscalculates in stories that do not fulfill the promises of their premises (a supermarket worker’s macho fantasies in “Less Than Perfect”; conventioneers driven to erotic frenzy by lectures on the physiology of the eponymous fruit in “Explaining Coconuts”). But echoes of Saki, John Collier and Roald Dahl are heard in depictions of an ailing dictator matching wits with the imprisoned woman surgeon who alone can save him (“Finesse”); an arrogant Scots couple unhinged by their flirtation with life in “the wild” (“A Hole with Two Ends”); and a violent thug whose compulsive mayhem leads him back to “Someone to Kiss It Better.”
Minor work from the author of The Courage Consort (2004, etc.), though animated by a polished, oddly engaging nastiness.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101314-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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by Louis L’Amour ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 1999
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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