Nothing astonishing here; just a gifted purveyor of American short fiction working on her craft and offering up the results.
A promising debut collection of short fiction and other ephemera from McCarty (English/ Salisbury Univ.).
The author offers a surprising diversity of tone scattered among the kinds of solid short stories that emerge from places like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The first of three distinct sections, “Animalia,” strongly represents melancholic remembrances. The book opens with the title story, a travelogue about crisscrossing New York City during a hot summer. The next story, “Fellowship," concerns a teenage girl who's dealing with her parents’ imminent divorce while simultaneously finding sexual frustration with the abstinent Christian boy to whom she’s attached herself. “Indirect Object” describes an uncomfortable encounter between a tutor and the father of one of his students. Another, “The Fat of the Land,” is about what it’s like to become soft when exchanging Manhattan for Iowa. The middle section, “Histology,” is brief, as are the flash fictions included within. They’re slight experiments like “Passive Aggressive,” which lays out all the reasons a woman is not speaking to her partner in advance of a girls’ weekend in Las Vegas. The final third, “Bacterium,” is where McCarty gets far more experimental with her storytelling. “Field Reports” amusingly examines a sexual encounter in the form of a lab report detailing blood alcohol levels, costuming, and body posture. The social satire “Another Zombie Story” takes aim at the deadening of life through technology. The final few stories fall back on more Midwestern slice-of-life moments centered on brash, masculine protagonists familiar to anyone who grew up in rural America. The collection sums itself up with “Anamesis: An Epilogue,” a kind of self-survey that notes a variety of conditions ranging from “Consistently underhydrated” to “One failed relationship ending in death.”
Nothing astonishing here; just a gifted purveyor of American short fiction working on her craft and offering up the results.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941143-03-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Aforementioned Productions
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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