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Author: Randy F. Nelson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344435
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The mechanical men in these stories—Industrial Age holdovers, outsiders wanting for relevance and respect, or overwhelmed people who confuse the certainties of one reality with the doubts of another—are cut off in some way from contemporary culture. Sometimes in these stories, which Randy F. Nelson calls "thought experiments about values in conflict," the characters are like the Native American prison guard in "Escape": Rifkin thinks that atonement is possible even for fugitive killers. Others are less sanguine. In "Breakers," a corporate hitman arrives on a forgettable island off the African coast. His mission: to shut down a hellish, polluting, ship-demolition business. His nemesis: a lawyer, now gone Heart-of-Darkness crazy, who preceded him years earlier for the same purpose. The bottom drops out in other stories, rearranging all reference points to good and bad, true and false. In "Abduction," for instance, a distraught young woman summons a tabloid reporter to a grubby hotel room, where the now-lifeless alien who had invaded her body lies wrapped in a sheet. Nelson once explained his motivations by alluding to a line in a Gabriel García Márquez story. A crowd of villagers are gazing upon a man, "but even though they were looking at him, there was no room for him in their imagination." "Stories and characters and situations that ask the imagination to accommodate something bigger, further, deeper—that's what I'm after," said Nelson.
Author: Randy F. Nelson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344435
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
The mechanical men in these stories—Industrial Age holdovers, outsiders wanting for relevance and respect, or overwhelmed people who confuse the certainties of one reality with the doubts of another—are cut off in some way from contemporary culture. Sometimes in these stories, which Randy F. Nelson calls "thought experiments about values in conflict," the characters are like the Native American prison guard in "Escape": Rifkin thinks that atonement is possible even for fugitive killers. Others are less sanguine. In "Breakers," a corporate hitman arrives on a forgettable island off the African coast. His mission: to shut down a hellish, polluting, ship-demolition business. His nemesis: a lawyer, now gone Heart-of-Darkness crazy, who preceded him years earlier for the same purpose. The bottom drops out in other stories, rearranging all reference points to good and bad, true and false. In "Abduction," for instance, a distraught young woman summons a tabloid reporter to a grubby hotel room, where the now-lifeless alien who had invaded her body lies wrapped in a sheet. Nelson once explained his motivations by alluding to a line in a Gabriel García Márquez story. A crowd of villagers are gazing upon a man, "but even though they were looking at him, there was no room for him in their imagination." "Stories and characters and situations that ask the imagination to accommodate something bigger, further, deeper—that's what I'm after," said Nelson.
Author: Darrell Spencer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337463
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The nine stories of CAUTION Men in Trees capture the pressure, need, and frequent helplessness of people confronted with intractable reality. As suggested by the collection's epigraph from Superman—"Did you say kryptonite?"—the characters in these stories have reached a point where they realize that parts of their lives are coming undone, and that their own thoughts and actions—or, frequently, the failure to act soon enough—are the cause. Though settings and situations vary, the same sense of overwhelming urgency recurs throughout the collection. The stories reflect a world distressed by conflict and settings fraught with the occurrences of personal violence. Against the background of the O. J. Simpson trial, a man refuses to assist in a friend's suicide and realizes that he has been avoiding many unpleasant truths about himself and his life. A son faced with his father's debilitating stroke sees that he must ultimately confront the mortality and feelings of grief that he has been concealing. In the title story, the film Bugsy and talk about the disappointing reality of pop-culture heroes set the scene for a husband's frightening confrontation with his own limitations. The shock of stark revelation combines with tightly wound chains of suggestive events to create a collection of gripping, edgy stories about characters who, however battered, survive.
Author: François Camoin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820344621
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
The tie that binds men and women, that makes men do absurd things that they will very likely be sorry for later, is at the center of this prize-winning collection of stories. There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love—badly and madly in love—with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can’t think. He eats, but it doesn’t taste like anything. He drives the freeways, floats above the city lights, and finds himself almost wishing that the Great Quake would come and solve everything for him. Some of Camoin’s characters are running: Diehl, from the necessity of finishing his second novel, of deciding once and for all the fate of its central character, who may be Diehl himself; the jogger-narrator of the story “Peacock Blue,” from the pain of his life (“What lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy.”); Loveman, to El Paso and a hustler’s dream of paradise that turns into something else.
Author: Dianne Nelson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820339970
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
In these stories, Dianne Nelson illuminates that vast territory of pleasure and pain created within modern families. Whether it is a father trying to kidnap his young son from his estranged ex-wife or a woman celebrating her ability to produce babies without any help from men, Nelson's characters reveal the dark, haunting and sometimes comic dilemmas of kinship. In the title story, seventeen-year-old April is an involuntary witness to the seemingly endless parade of lovers who frequent her mother's bed. "I don't know why my mother finds no lasting peace" she muses. Opening a book and trying to find her peace in "facts, dates, the pure honesty of numbers," April is overwhelmed finally by the sounds of lovemaking from the adjoining room. "The walls of this house aren't thick enough to keep that kind of sadness contained." In "The Uses of Memory," Netta and Carlene are engaged in a different sort of mother-daughter drama. The issue at hand is the fate of Franklin, their husband and father, who lies in bed in a near comatose state, oblivious to the nurturings or pleadings of either woman. The past, with its countless repercussion on the present, tugs relentlessly at many of the characters. In "Chocolate," the lingering pain of an impoverished childhood plagues Janice; she recalls, in particular, the birthday and Christmas celebrations, the meager gifts wrapped in the same brown twine that was used to hold the door shut. Hillary, the narrator of "Dixon," is spurred into action by the memory of her dead brother. When a local barfly with "silt for brains" persists in telling outlandish lies about Dixon, Hillary takes up karate training with an eye to defending her brother's name the truth of what she knew him to be. Dee, in "Paperweight," can pinpoint the exact moment at which she came to think of the body as an earthbound trap, "a hopeless house with the doors all locked"; she traces it back to a grade-school theatrical performance and a classmate's luckless efforts to open the cumbersome stage curtains. "If it weren't for my body," she laments, "I could fly, I could go anywhere, I could be anything." Ranging in setting from a restaurant in St. Louis to the rain-soaked streets of San Francisco, from a boisterous family reunion beneath the broad Kansas sky to a ranch in Utah where a young father dreams of becoming a movie star, these fifteen stories show men and women pondering--and often struggling against--the mysteries of their own circumstances, especially the bonds of flesh and blood.
Author: Ellen J. Levy
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348279
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
In this funny, brainy, thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer looks at romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the information age. In ten captivating and tender stories, E. J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love--whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child--drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor's life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister's second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way--by falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind--shooting cupid's arrow toward a target that may never be reached.
Author: Lori Ostlund
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336882
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Set among such divergent places as a small-town in Minnesota, an Albuquerque airport, A Belizean café and a hotel swimming pool in Java, Ostlund's Flannery O'Connor Award (2008) winning debut collection depicts sexually and socially repressed Americans. Men and women who wind up feeling displaced when they fail to escape the influence of their past; ineffectual parents, fathers and lovers who disappear, teachers who struggle to connect with their students, and lifelong obsessions with language.
Author: Ethan Laughman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820358401
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Work, and the coffee-fueled day-to-day grind, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on work—and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Sometimes work is rewarding, and sometimes it’s just demanding. From the cubicle to the courtroom, from the stage to the station. These fifteen stories reflect upon the time we dedicate to the jobs we do, from the moment we begin our commute to the second we return home, and every hardworking hour in between.
Author: Susan Neville
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337056
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Tells the stories of a grandmother suffering from cancer, a woman who helps her neighbor throw out her husband, a traveling magician, a pianist and his wife, and a young daydreamer
Author: Geoffrey Becker
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034219X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
A collection of short stories follows such people as struggling performers, con men, expectant parents, and travelers, who are all on the brink of a turning point in their lives and about to take the next step.
Author: Ethan Laughman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820357618
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Front porches, family cars, playgrounds, swimming pools: from such familiar haunts of childhood, these stories look out on the world through young eyes and hearts. Wise beyond their years—or soon to be—Ruthie, Omar, J.J., and the other kids in these stories veer in and out of touching distance to hard lessons about trust, love, and mortality. However engaged or aloof, grownups are always nearby. Far-from-perfect emissaries to the realm of adulthood, they pose questions for children even as they offer answers.
