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THE USHERS

Name: THE USHERS
Author: Edward Lee
ISBN: 1-891480-04-9

STORIES

by Edward Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 20, 1999

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paper 1-891480-03-0 Cult fiction for necrophiliacs, in an anthology that reinstates the more horrid passages Lee removed for magazine publication. These are the kinds of stories that ghouls sit up all night reading while sucking on maggots. That characterization will not likely injure the author’s feelings, since he describes his own writing as “a joyride through a whorehouse in hell” or “a break-neck trip down a waterslide only to land in a wafting, hot corpse-pile.” Well, yes, these ripe self-estimates do Lee justice. He delves fearlessly into the worst that human life has to offer, much as Beckett stares very hard into darkness and finds no delight aside from the joys of language. If only Lee (widely published in genre —zines and paperback but previously unreviewed by Kirkus) had the Irishman’s gift for words. “Death, She Said,— the first story here—which is about as sweet as a dead mouse—inverts Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: a man about to slash his wrists is shown the upside of life by the angel of death (a whore) who woos him back from the brink, then shows him a downside so ghastly that the upside is meaningless. In the writing game you buy your own coffin and dig your own grave—even with a marvelously padded satin lining like Updike’s and maybe a swell cenotaph—and you lie in it. Lee for now has chopped off his legs at the ankles and dances on his own grave.

Pub Date: Dec. 20, 1999

ISBN: 1-891480-04-9

Page Count: 301

Publisher: Obsidian

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

by Jacqueline Harpman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

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I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-888363-43-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ORLANDA
by Jacqueline Harpman & translated by Ros Schwartz

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.