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NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH

Name: NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH
Author: Shannon Ravenel
ISBN: 1-56512-375-1

THE YEAR’S BEST, 2002

edited by Shannon Ravenel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2002

Ravenel is one of the most resourceful and intelligent editors in the business, and this entertaining 17th installment is...

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Several excitingly original stories from new and recently emergent writers make this now-venerable annual a must for readers who mean to keep up with contemporary short fiction.

The volume gets off to a rocky start with novelist Larry Brown’s meandering, pointless preface (which really ought to have been scrapped). But it strikes gold with its first entry, playwright Romulus Linney’s beautifully structured, compellingly detailed story (“Tennessee”) of an elderly country woman’s survival of hardship, duplicity, and inexorably changing times. Other veteran writers include Max Steele, whose anecdotal “The Unripe Heart” smoothly conveys the confusion of a distracted preadolescent’s wary relationship with his “crazy” menopausal mother; Russell Banks, who limns in “The Outer Banks” a retired couple’s unspoken shared apprehension of their own fate as they deal with the death of their dog; and Doris Betts, at her nerve-grating best in the tense tale (“Aboveground”) of a grieving mother’s conflicted lingering reactions to the murder of her teenaged daughter. Pieces by newly familiar writers include Dwight Allen’s nostalgic, richly comic remembrance of a garrulous eccentric family’s misadventures (“End of the Steam Age”); Lucia Nevai’s sure-handed portrayal of a troubled marriage and a terminal illness “treated” by a forthright “Faith Healer”; and Bill Roorbach’s wonderful “Big Bend,” whose original premise matches a septuagenarian widower working for the National Park Service with a married amateur ornithologist, in a muted romantic comedy that features some irresistible dialogue exchanges (e.g., “The flesh is weak. . . . The flesh has a job to do”). The best discoveries include Aaron Gwyn’s somber, involving depiction (“Of Falling”) of a luckless “survivor” of numerous accidents who sees in the entire shape of his life the fact of his mortality; Corey Mesler’s racy Faustian tale (“The Growth and Death of Buddy Gardner”) of a ’60s blues artist’s supposed “pact with the devil”; and George Singleton’s very funny “Show-and-Tell,” about a schoolboy employed by his divorced father in a devious campaign to romance the boy’s teacher.

Ravenel is one of the most resourceful and intelligent editors in the business, and this entertaining 17th installment is one of her most pleasing productions.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2002

ISBN: 1-56512-375-1

Page Count: 344

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH
edited by Shannon Ravenel

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH
edited by Shannon Ravenel

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH
edited by Shannon Ravenel

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

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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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.