by Victoria Lancelotta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2000
A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these...
A debut collection of 13 stories that explores with authority the internal landscape of girls and women struggling for redemption.
Colored by the Catholic experience, the females in these pieces suffer from emotions that the nuns, despite their fervor for obedience and order, have failed to suppress. Death and sex, disappointment and disability abound. Sometimes the terror is real, as in “In Houses,” where the narrator’s face is slashed (“I have had a new face for three months now, three months since my old one was cut”), and “Nice Girl,” where the accidental drowning of an eight-year-old haunts her younger sister’s life (“My mother says I screamed . . . I lay on the edge of the pool screaming down into the water at my sister for our mother who became, that day, my mother”). But more often, that terror is as subtle as a teenaged girl contemplating her attractiveness (“Quiet”) or an abandoned woman waiting for a visit from her young son (“Here in the World”). Lancelotta, who’s published in the Threepenny Review and Glimmer Train, among other places, sets up interesting and out-of-the-box situations: a blind man taken home as a lover from a bus stop in “The Guide,” and a girl who is moved by her immigrant grandmother’s story of being molested by an uncle in “The Gift.” The pervading sense of distance and estrangement between couples, family members, and neighbors is palpable throughout the collection, with the strongest entries being those told in the first-person by nameless narrators who bare their souls in taut muscular prose. But while Lancelotta’s voice is powerful, it is also self-conscious, and the reach for literary expression more often than not obscures the tale .
A talented newcomer who, one hopes, next time out will reveal more clearly the secrets she’s kept to herself in these poetically written but ultimately aimless stories.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-099-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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