A charming collection of poetry, stories, essays and music shared by storytellers, for storytellers, at an annual Southern gathering—the Shoe Burnin’.
In this unique assortment of poetry, prose, memoir, music and more, editor Formichella (Whores for Life, 1997) introduces readers to one of the South’s worst-kept secrets: the Shoe Burnin’, an event spawned by a drinking binge and a burn pile fueled by a box of old footwear. Now an annual Thanksgiving tradition taking place just outside Fairhope, Alabama, the Shoe Burnin’ hosts Southern writers eager to share stories with their peers over a pile of burning canvas and leather. Collected here, thanks in no small part to curator and contributor Shari Smith, are the works of some of these gatherers, a multimedia experience of more than 20 stories along with an accompanying CD presenting several of those tales in spoken word form, alongside songs influenced by the traditions of blues, soul, country and folk music. Each story is a balance of crass and colorful, hip and quirky, some featuring straightforward narratives while others amble, attempting to capture something more ethereal. There’s a surprising level of inclusiveness as well, with numerous female authors, the integration of other cultures and, in Marlin Barton’s “Short Days, Dog Days,” the mash-up of a man dealing with his daughter’s lesbianism and a floating light, illustrating the begrudging changes to Southern values. Other tales convey familiar country archetypes with modern-day twists, perhaps the most notable being Suzanne Hudson’s “All the Way to Memphis,” featuring a murderous housewife picking up an ADHD-stricken hitchhiker who turns her on to a sort of morbid self-actualization. The repetition of shoes in each story, the theme that ties it all together, can seem pat at times, but focusing overmuch on that would be missing the point; the shoes are merely an excuse, a gateway for the storytellers to share with their fellow storytellers as the footwear fire burns.
A charming assortment that, for some readers, could retune the meaning of Southern.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1940595009
Page Count: 216
Publisher: River's Edge Media
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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