by Stephen Dobyns ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2000
Forget the overexplicit morals Dobyns tacks onto so many of these tales (e.g., “Writing . . . took a jumble of information,...
Though it’s taken a while for veteran poet/novelist Dobyns (Boy in the Water, 1999, etc.) to get around to his first volume of short fiction, the 16 stories here are well worth the wait.
Like so many other folks these days, Dobyns’s heroes (and, occasionally, heroines) are leading lives of quiet desperation until something makes them jump their groove: developing a friendship with the man they’re cuckolding; enduring electroshock treatments that awaken them to the moral consequences of their cruel pranks; having to deal with a son depressed over the car crash that killed a friend, or with a visiting professor who won’t check out of the motel room his hosts are paying for. But instead of killing themselves or each other, Dobyns’s suddenly disenfranchised players, like Raymond Carver’s, flip out in far more inventive, less fatal ways. When her poet husband Jason dies after a freak encounter with a falling pig, his widow, stung by the way everyone refashions Jason as the poet who was killed by a pig, eventually uses his risible reputation to escape the burden of grieving. A backwoods farmer who insists that his gas man’s broken leg must be a divine punishment forces the angry, hurting gas man to reexamine his deeds as he lies on the farmer’s basement floor. A boy haunted for life by his meeting with a farmer on the way to kill his wife and her lover ends in death haunting his own son in much the same way. And in the title story, a meet-cute over a dead deer briefly provokes an estranged husband to a bout of tonic atavism before he skips just as abruptly back into his groove.
Forget the overexplicit morals Dobyns tacks onto so many of these tales (e.g., “Writing . . . took a jumble of information, arranged the pieces, and turned it into a mystery”) and let them work their considerable magic.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6022-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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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