That said, the pleasures here outdistance the shortcomings by a country mile.
The familiar annual celebrates its 20th anniversary with 19 stories that pull their imaginative starter cultures from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
With an introduction by Jill McCorkle, whose account of an exchange with a Northern waiter who tells her iced tea is “out of season” is worth the price of admission, the collection contains seven must-not-miss stories, three by relative newcomers and four by seasoned pros. Stephanie Soileau’s star-turn “The Boucherie,” about a group of Cajun old-timers who conspire to hide an AWOL cow from the authorities while making a refugee family from Sudan (which they all think is in India) feel right at home, is sure to clinch her a first-book contract if she doesn’t have one already. Two other writers to watch, Ethan Hauser and Rebecca Soppe, also offer fiction that feels decidedly rooted in a 21st-century South, with, respectively, “The Charm of the Highway Median” and “The Pantyhose Man.” From the trusty Southern tale-tellers, Allan Gurganus conjures a retired librarian’s path to sexual enlightenment in “My Heart Is a Snake Farm”; Moira Crone reveals the consequences of never saying anything not nice in “Mr. Sender”; Robert Olen Butler solves one of the great riddles of our time in “Severance”; and Judy Budnitz haunts the reader with her story of a Civil War surgeon’s desperate, final act in “The Kindest Cut.” Anniversaries are helpful milestones for pausing and taking stock of traditions to ensure they’re thriving and not headed down a worn path. In that spirit, it’s important to note that several stories here, including work by Gregory Sanders, Lucinda Harrison Coffman and Janice Daugharty, are familiar as kudzu along a Georgia highway.
That said, the pleasures here outdistance the shortcomings by a country mile.Pub Date: June 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-469-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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