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A carregar... The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)por Alice Adams (Editor), Katrina Kenison (Series editor)
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.   ) overlycriticalelisa | Apr 2, 2013 |  In the Forward to this book, Series Editor Katrina Kenison makes the following observation: "Alice Adams reveals in her introduction that reading a good story often provokes her to go and write one of her own. Perhaps we should all give thanks, then, for the inspiration writers draw from each other - one good story begets another." There are many, many good stories in this book, some of which I found inspirational for my own writing and some in which I simply lost myself. My top three favorite reads, which I hope to go back to again and again, were the following: 1. Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.'s "The Point." In this story a man reminisces about helping his mom's friends home after parties thrown by his mother at their house. He has memories of very interesting characters, most of them sad alcoholics, yet he seems to have turned out just fine. 2. Charles Baxter's "The Disappeared." In this story a Swedish businessman visits Detroit and meets a religious-crazed American girl who temporarily steals his heart. The main character in the story, however, is truly the city of Detroit. It's amazing how Baxter captures the pulse of a dying city, and makes dreadfully accurate predictions regarding its fate. 3. Elizabeth Graver's "The Body Shop." In this story a man looks back on his adolescent years of helping his creative and entrepreneurial mother run her mannequin design business. It is touching and very realistic. I also enjoyed Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie," Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water," David Jauss' "Glossolalia," Francine Prose's "Dog Stories," and Leonard Michaels' "Viva La Tropicana," a very entertaining and far-fetched yet somehow believable story about a young man who gets caught up with the escapades of his uncle, a former Cuban revolutionist-turned-gangster. There are stories by some other usual "giants" in this collection - Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, John Updike - but I didn't enjoy them as much as the others I've mentioned. I haven't read much from Munro but I usually like reading Oates and Updike. Both of their pieces in this collection, however, seemed wordy and cumbersome to me, and I couldn't pay much attention. Munro's story was the most interesting to me, and I also like parts of Updike's piece, and feel that perhaps if I read it when I had more time and patience, I would like it more. Perhaps it had something to do with it being the last story in the book! All and all, I loved this book as well as most others in this series. I love the variety as well as the convenience of a collection of short stories. It is so easy to escape into a short story, come back out of it into reality, and then get lost in the next one when I again have time! For book reviews, literary musings, quotes, and more, for writers and readers, please visit my blog, Voracia: Goddess of Words (  ) voracia | Oct 5, 2009 | sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Includes stories "Houdini" by Siri Hustvedt and "Glossolalia" by David Jauss, both of whom are Minnesota authors.
The first sentence of the first story in this collection - "We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights" - lures the reader with its promise of a strange and unfamiliar world. The selection, by Rick Bass, does not disappoint, taking us on a tour of "backwoods nightspots" where an aspiring fighter trains for a career in the big city. Story after story - there are 20 in all - matches Bass's opening gambit, with a dazzling mix of telling details and poignant character portraits. There are Charles D'Ambrosio Jr.'s 13-year-old protagonist who must escort his mother's drunken friend to her home; the woman in Siri Hustvedt's tale who enters a hospital because of a months-old migraine and whose neighbor, an old woman, one day climbs in bed with her and begins kissing her passionately; the sullen teenager, created by David Jauss, whose father is fired for embezzling, then hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Ashamed, the son blurts out to a friend that his father died of a brain tumor; years later, a father himself, the son reflects, "I had always loved my father, though behind his back, without letting him know it. And in a way, behind my back, too." Adams wrote Second Chances. - Publisher's Weekly. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.0108Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Short fictionClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.36)
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