A victory lap for the Pushcart Prize.
To mark a quarter-century of publishing the “best of the small press”—including over 500 short stories—editor Henderson has selected his favorite 44, which reflect both the triumphs and the shortcomings of post-Watergate American fiction.
Henderson resists the urge to put this work on a par with “the best stories of the century,” but simply calls them “the fictions of our time, from our heartland, presented without commercial interruption.” The first third of the volume highlights tales by Pushcart’s big names from the ’70s and ’80s—John Irving, Tim O’Brien (represented by “Going After Cacciato,” the Vietnam story later published as a full novel), Cynthia Ozick, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mona Simpson, Richard Ford (the classic “Communist,” published later in Rock Springs), and above all Raymond Carver, whose “A Small, Good Thing” has grown even sharper with age. Moving into the late ’80s and ’90s, Henderson offers up Wally Lamb, Stephen Millhauser, Ha Jin, Junot Díaz, and Rick Moody. Despite the geographical variety of settings from Kentucky to Minnesota to California, monotony looms over many stories anatomizing middle-class family relationships. A certain uniformity of style and a penchant for the present tense occasionally betray the authors’ progress through MFA programs. This monotony is the problem not of this volume, however, but of all contemporary fiction; and since these are 44 of the best writers around, they often manage to transcend the limitations of their age. A large handful that deserve special mention include Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Hair,” which creepily charts the way two married couples fall in love with each other; Tobias Wolff’s “The Life of the Body,” about an English teacher’s lonely 24 hours; and Charles Baxter’s “The Harmony of the World,” a subtle account of a failed pianist. A cognate volume of essays has already been published (p. 1081), and Pushcart poetry is slated for early 2002.
A victory lap for the Pushcart Prize.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-888889-23-3
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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