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NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH

THE YEAR'S BEST, 1994

Persuasive voices, emotional depth, and a wide range of points of view distinguish these 16 stories of generally high quality. Ravenel, a native of the Carolinas, has culled tales by well- and lesser-known authors from American literary magazines ranging from the Carolina Quarterly to Harper's. Protagonists include a not-so-Faulknerian Mississippi boy turned narcotics abuser and a Peace Corps volunteer only somewhat reminiscent of Styron's Peyton Loftis. Ethan Canin's memorable ``The Palace Thief'' is as carefully mapped out as a Roman campaign, whetting readers' appetites for learning about history even as western civilization is collapsing around the story's key players. While dealing with a school bully whose father is a corrupt senator in West Virginia, an ancient-history teacher learns that political power and great nations arise ``from the simple battle of wills among men at tables.'' In Reynolds Price's equally illuminating ``Deeds of Light,'' a young boy's need to replace his dead father with a soldier camped in his town during World War II becomes the catalyst for his awakening sexuality; Price's deep psychological rendering of the protagonist is truly satisfying. Robert Morgan's devastating ``Dark Corner,'' about a penniless, dispossessed Texas family traveling to North Carolina, hooks readers with the tragic, knowing narrative voice of a young girl and skillfully illustrates human beings' noble but futile attempts to beat back death. Some stories seem less fleshed out than others. Melanie Sumner's ``My Other Life'' gives us the barest hint of character development beyond alcoholism and defiance—and the faintest of epiphanies before abruptly ending. And while John Sayles's ``Peeling'' draws power from its immediacy and authentic dialogue among crawfish shuckers in Louisiana, it seems more like a slice of life than a fully realized story. In the tradition of earlier southern writers, but echoing today's sounds.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-56512-088-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

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