Carrying the Torch: Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction). Brock Clarke

Carrying the Torch: Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)



Download Carrying the Torch: Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)



Carrying the Torch: Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) Brock Clarke. pdf ebook
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Page: 187
ISBN: 0803215517, 9780803215511

From Publishers Weekly

Clarke maps out the New South in the nine assured stories of his second collection, subtly linking America's decaying Northern cities and Southern suburban sprawl with the frayed emotional microcosm of the migratory families who inhabit these territories. In the title story, set in sterile suburban Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, a wronged wife whose wry, breezy voice overlays painful emptiness crafts a wooden model of her philandering husband's penis while she fantasizes about severing the real thing. The decayed core of a marriage mirrors the urban blight of Savannah, Ga., in the fantastical "For Those of Us Who Need Such Things," about a husband who learns a bleak lesson about the myths of authenticity and true love when he buys and attempts to revitalize the Southern city in an effort to win back his estranged wife. "I'm not the man I once was and feel no need to defend myself," declares the unreliable narrator of "The Son's Point of View," a deficient father who inevitably asserts his version of history while trying to inhabit his son's point of view. Clarke's light touch in these layered stories brings home the plight of his unfaithful husbands, dissatisfied wives and angry children in search of home and meaning.
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From

Be prepared to be surprised on every page of Clarke's collection of brilliant short stories. Oh, they may not be the kind of shockers that accompany truly cataclysmic plot twists, and there are no deus ex machinas lurking in the final paragraphs. Clarke's literary bombshells are more subtle than that. His are of the appreciatively hushed "wow!" and "whoa!" variety that accompany a sublimely crafted sentence or a distinctive turn of phrase that comes seemingly out of nowhere, with its unexpected ability to render large truths in such a pithily appropriate way that even the most critical reader will sit up and take notice. Variously expressed in the wistful longings of a disenchanted wife in "The Fund-Raiser's Dance Card," the deep psychic pain of abuse victims in "The Apology," or through the existential conundrum explored in "For Those of Us Who Need Such Things," Clarke's piquant ruminations on the human condition are both subdued and effusive, simultaneously bitter with hard-won wisdom and giddy with dewy-eyed optimism. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved



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