To be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that
perhaps we are sleepwalking--that's what life can be like for the
people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers
of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and
narrative daring.
The characters range from a fragile, and very rich, Mount
Holyoke College girl in Paris to an out-of-work American
businessman caught up in an international financial scam in Buenos
Aires; from a happy-go-lucky old piano-lounge performer, once
famous in all the New England seaside resorts, to a quartet of
passengers on a bus barreling across the Mexican desert on
Christmas Eve--and heading right toward a nightmarish encounter
indeed on the road. In one story, a troubled guy who is somehow
both himself on a hockey scholarship at Harvard in the sixties and
himself a few decades later, meets his beautiful lost girlfriend at
a long-gone Cambridge cafeteria. The busboys become hovering
angels. Time slips backward and forward. Things that happened may
not have happened.
While rich with specific detail of character and place, these
stories also tap into the stranger kind of clarity that does come,
paradoxically, from subtle disorientation, as found in innovators
like Nabokov and Borges. LaSalle's lovely, rhythmic sentences, in
which an aside can sometimes be the central concern, create a
captivating permeability in the boundary between real and unreal
while always enchanting with their power simply to tell a moving
story. This is very original short fiction that aspires to nothing
less than reasserting the wonderful possibilities of the genre--or,
as the narrator of the story "The End of Narrative" ultimately
suggests: "Maybe narrative hadn't ended, which is to say, hasn't
ended."
General
Imprint: |
University of Georgia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction |
Release date: |
March 2012 |
First published: |
April 2012 |
Authors: |
Peter Lasalle
|
Dimensions: |
203 x 133 x 23mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
272 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8203-4216-0 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
Special features >
Short stories
|
LSN: |
0-8203-4216-5 |
Barcode: |
9780820342160 |
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