While not every offering will surprise readers, these tales provide new ways of looking at biblical figures.
A collection of short stories centers on the time of Jesus.
Casper’s (The Sing Song Child, 2015) first tale in this volume begins with a carpenter with a withered hand. Although the man did well for himself, at one point he angered the wrong Pharisee and people began to wonder if his deformity was a curse from God. When the carpenter meets Jesus, his hand is miraculously healed. The story has its origins in the Gospel of Mark, and most of the other tales here also have their bases in the New Testament. There is the conversion of Saul of Tarsus; the quelling of a tempest by Jesus on the Sea of Galilee; and the changing of water into wine at a wedding celebration. Portions that stray from biblical material include “Right Hand Man,” a firsthand account of a robber and murderer who is crucified on Golgotha, and “Thief,” which features letters Judas Iscariot, “that rodent of a man,” writes to himself. One foray into more modern times involves a demon’s attempt to trick a dying war veteran. Each story is written in plain language, as in “Thief” (“He cleared his throat. I could see tears streaming down his cheeks”), and kept relatively short, about 10 pages or less. Some of these brief narratives work well in humanizing otherwise opaque situations. What might it feel like to be a criminal in the time of Jesus and suffer crucifixion for a misdeed? The story of the robber skillfully drives home the brutality of Roman rule, not to mention the nearly inconceivable idea of being personally involved in one of the most famous narratives of all time. By contrast, more familiar tales are somewhat less thrilling. The man with the withered hand doesn’t have a whole lot in his backstory of interest. Sure, the Pharisee he angered was hypocritical and the protagonist jokingly admits that he was a better carpenter than Jesus, but such details hardly make him memorable. Likewise, the rendition of Saul’s miraculous change does not add much to the biblical telling. Nevertheless, the pieces progress smoothly and are strongest when expanding on (in an easy-to-read manner) what any reader with a loose understanding of the New Testament already knows.
While not every offering will surprise readers, these tales provide new ways of looking at biblical figures.Pub Date: June 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9905144-1-1
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Sing Song Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
