Title
Short Stories Are Not Real Life: Stories (Southern Literary Studies),Used
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About the Author David R. Slavitt has published over 100 books of poetry, fiction, and translation, including The Octaves, Civil Wars, and The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems. Product Description In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David R. Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiacthis collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.The title story (complete with footnotes la The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) braids together the tidy conventions of fiction and the brutal reality of New York as a writing teacher ponders s students sexually explicit story that mayor may notbe autobiographical. In The Impostor a writers brother exploits the legerdemain of fiction in a series of everbolder impersonations.Several of the stories are presented by emotionally wounded narrators, disillusioned men looking for a hint of grace in a world where expectations are frequently doomed to disappointment. In such a world only one thing is certain we will hurtand be hurt bythe ones we love. And in the vacuum left when traditions that might have been redemptive have lost their meaning, punishment gets to be a habit, a way of life, or at least something to hold onto. The stories pivot on nuance, on the halfrealized insight, on some perfectly innocent and insignificant insight, on some perfectly innocent and insignificant gesture that turns round and grows into a mediumtolarge awkwardness.We find what the divorced father futilely awaiting his daughters visit in Hurricane Charlie calls dabblers in distress: lonely, decent people trying to discover where loveand lifewent. In Simple Justice a man striving for some definitive family memory compares the process to archaeology: The shards that remain are pathetically small and almost grudging. Thus through the faltering memory of an elderly cousin in conflations a man becomes a kind of incarnation of his own father and for a moment finds himself at the vanishing point where a lost past meets an unknowable future; in The long Island Train a simple anecdote becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the most apparently transparent human intentions. Yet it is often these shard of tradition and memory that seem to hold our only promise of transcendence. The protagonist of Grandfather, for example, through his reluctant participation in his grandsons bris, finds a moment of reconciliation with a past that has broken loose of its moorings.Even the most experimental of these piecesInstructions, a list of admonitions ranging from the quotidian to the cosmicshows a deep humanity and a maturity of vision that steers adeptly between humor and despair. These stories will linger in the readers memory long after the book is closed.
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