The Last Good Man (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction),Used

Product Description Set in the depressed industrial city of Lawton Falls, Massachusetts, the eleven short stories in this book offer a detailed portrayal of its characters' secret lives. These cohesive stories follow the ethnically diverse group of characters in their bleak environment. From Publishers Weekly The depressed industrial Boston suburb of Lawton Falls is the setting for this impressive fiction debut. In 11 linked short stories, Lyons portrays a bleak environment including corrupt politicians, twobit mafiosi, abandoned textile mills and characters whose one true talent is survival. Among the welldrawn characters are a young Puerto Rican mother and laundress who appears in various stories and, we discover in "Brothers," was raped as a teen; Jerry Gallagher, the bitter newspaper reporter and protagonist of the title story, who learns40 years too latethat his one true love reciprocates his emotions; and the priest in "The Miracle," who, when faced with the prospect of losing his parish, makes a deal with the neighborhood devil. The writing here is brisk and clean, if unexceptional, and the stories are finely detailed.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Like Sherwood Anderson's classic Winesburg, Ohio , Lyons's debut collection of 11 storieswinner of the Associated Writing Programs 1992 Award in Short Fictionlifts the rock off a seemingly sleepy town to cast light on the quietly desperate secret lives of its inhabitants. Lawton Falls, Massachusetts is a dying mill city whose ethnically mixed population includes politicians, priests, bluecollar workers, mixedup teens, and the newspaperman of the title tale who, at the end of an undistinguished career, wrestles with the morality of making "a great deal of money in an illicit fashion." Lyons, a remarkably gifted writer, renders these slices of life with compassion and a keen eye for telling detail. Highly recommended. David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. District Lib., Canton, OhioCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A gripping and remarkably fine first collection of 11 stories, mapping the changing moral byways of a dying New England milltown and angling inside the lives of the town's often warring Irish, Italian, Wasp, and newer Puerto Rican inhabitants. In The First Snow,'' a contemporary 17yearold son sticks by his fathera weak, overweight, Waspy Lawton Falls juniorhigh teacher who has just been arrested for homosexual conduct at a highway reststopeven though his mother and brother have fled in horror and he is repelled, too. In The Miracle,'' a devoted priest called Father D'Agostino, whose parish is the poorest in Lawton Falls in the 1960's, hesitantly asks a local gangster named Davio Giaccalone for help in saving the church from demolition; a fire is set elsewhere, the church is preserved, but a homeless man dies, and D'Agostino is undone by moral pain. In Violet'' and All Best Wishes,'' contemporary town yuppies face revealing romantic crises; and in The Greyhounds,'' two insouciant young computer programmers from out of town steal an aging Davio Giaccalone's beloved greyhound doga mistake, as it turns out, since Giaccalone is still dangerous. The violence turns explicit in the Brothers,'' about the gang rape of a Puerto Rican girl by three Irish and Italian garage mechanics in the 1970's. The girl, Maria Mendez, is seen again in The Birthday Cake,'' in which an old Italian woman refuses to give up the last cake in a neighborhood bakery for Maria's daughter's birthday party. Davio Giaccalone is definitively betrayed in the elegant, almost classic The Last Good Man'': while maneuvering to keep the town's last mill from being closed by the Japanese, he entrusts crucial information to a newspaper reporter who, however, has resolved to learn to look out for himself. There's moreall of it rich in detail and theme. Copy