Synopses & Reviews
The masterly stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer's craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early
Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. Gordon captures the sharp scent of feelings as they shift, the shape of particular lives in their hope and incomprehensibility.
In "The Neighborhood," a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. "City Life" explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. "Intertextuality" proposes a dream meeting between Proust's characters and the author's aging grandmother.
Throughout, Gordon's surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: "What were they all, any of them, feeling?" one narrator ventures. "This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things."
With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon's clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.
Review
"Viewed as a whole, this collection is remarkable for its sheer variety of subject and setting." Boston Globe
Review
"Several of the collection's shorter, more impressionistic pieces are heavy on whimsy and light on substance....Throughout the book, there are many happy surprises: an original and pragmatic point of view, a distinctive intermingling of humor and tragedy, a high level of empathy." New York Times
Review
"It's a rich introduction...to Gordon's talent, filled with the themes she has explored elsewhere in her work, told here in miniature. Her characters confront that which haunts them, take journeys into their pasts, struggle to maintain a toehold in a sometimes bewildering world." Seattle Times
Review
"Gordon's stories do not spill out on the page. But there is a point in each where the writer opens her fist to let the story fly out. This is where they become voluptuous." Los Angeles Times
Review
"A Mary Gordon short story is neither facile nor moralizing. She lays the story out beautifully crafted, elegantly written and the reader takes it from there." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"Her prose is so precise that she is not to be skimmed, but slowly savored." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Synopsis
Spanning the author's entire career, a compilation of short fiction offers an panoramic study of Irish-American life, in a collection that includes "The Neighborhood," about a young girl who has lost both her father and her joy in life; "City Life," a portrait of the dark side of apartment living; and interlinked tales from Temporary Shelter. 25,000 first printing.
About the Author
Mary Gordon is the author of six novels, including Final Payments and Pearl; a memoir, The Shadow Man; and an earlier collection of stories, Temporary Shelter. She has received a Lila WallaceReader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1997 O. Henry Award for Best Story, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.