A welcome addition to the run of established short story annuals, promising good work to come.
Worthy showcase of winning short fiction by recipients of a newly established PEN prize.
The Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize honors work by emerging writers published in North America, and the range of publications represented here is refreshingly broad: it includes not just the usual suspects (Boston Review, Southwest Review), but also journals that are themselves emerging into broader view (Epiphany, Hyphen). The judges' choices are uniformly solid; the stories are widely situated but with some points in common. Many feature family members in dramatic situations. In Ruth Serven’s very short story “A Message,” a mysterious father is revealed to have households scattered across the Balkans: “You say that someday you’ll find each of your siblings. Your father will buy a house and you’ll all live together. Like Full House.” The pop-culture references aren’t confined to 1980s nostalgia; in Emily Chammah’s lovely “Tell Me, Please,” two Jordanian sisters reveal only so much of themselves on their Facebook pages, disguising the fact that they’re “from the Beni Hasan tribe, that we live in Mafrag, that we attend Al al-Bayt University.” When their father discovers that one of the girls is reading Animal Farm, in which, as one of the sisters puts it, pigs take over a farm, he moans, “My God, what is happening in my home?” Here a Russian émigrée of indeterminate age sees a golden hawk that, she is impatiently told, does not exist; there a Korean couple drink like fish, “as if we girls are invisible,” as one daughter puts it, just one moment of the familial minefield the children have to traverse. Perhaps the best single moment, from a story by writer Grace Oluseyi, involves two Nigerians, tentatively dating, who bond over sushi, the woman saying to the man, “I was thinking about my grandmother, back home. And how she would be horrified that we would pay to eat raw fish.”
A welcome addition to the run of established short story annuals, promising good work to come.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-68-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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