Confrontational and at times confounding, these are stories to get lost in, then gratefully chart a path homeward.
These stories thrive on discomfort, so much so that each small kindness registers as a minor miracle.
Editor Boyle favors dark tales, but they often have strange, bright moments. In Kevin Canty's "Happy Endings," a widower's worldview expands after he finds comfort in a massage parlor. "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Laura Lee Smith offers a cowed husband, father, and employee a one-day respite from ass-kissing via a highly spontaneous crime spree. There's a jittery veteran untethered from space and time ("The Fugue" by Arna Bontemps Hemenway) and one calmly using his prosthesis to shut down a dinner party ("The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson). Victor Lodato's "Jack, July" spends a hot, haunting day with a young man in need of a meth fix. As is common with this series, the authors' notes at the end include insight from each about the inspiration and process behind his or her chosen works. Jess Walter describes "Mr. Voice," the final story and a strikingly upbeat one, as all following from a perfect first line. Its 1970s setting and protagonist—a teen girl finding stability with her unusual stepfather—are a pleasing counterpoint to the downbeat and downtrodden who sometimes overwhelm this volume. Stories of children lost, then found, ("Sh'khol" by Colum McCann and "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken) seem like they would resolve happily, but be not fooled. In the first, joy and relief immediately turn to suspicion and then a sense of greater loss; the second finds a family so fractured by what happened it's unclear whether they'll heal in its wake. Five of the 20 stories chosen first appeared in The New Yorker, and the others share their preference for occasional inscrutability. Many also test the boundaries of "short," nearly novellas in terms of length and scope.
Confrontational and at times confounding, these are stories to get lost in, then gratefully chart a path homeward.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-547-93940-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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