Synopses & Reviews
In praise of her first story collection, Girls in the Grass, the New York Times wrote, Melanie Rae Thon belts out her short stories in a tone and style reminiscent of classic blues singers . . . The reader is swept along not only by her remarkable characterizations but also by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch. Thon brings to her new collection all the emotional intensity and vibrant lyricism that marked her first, in stories that are both dazzling and unsettling. In the title story, chosen by Jane Smiley for The Best American Short Stories 1995, a 326-pound woman in a Seattle morgue pins a Vietnam vet to the floor. A young girl in Florida reveals the secret dangers of her privileged life: alligators and furious ducks, a crippled grandfather, a burning car. Taking us from the cobblestoned streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, Thon's stories transport us to the borderlands, to the places where sudden accidents and misguided pa
Synopsis
This is Ms. Thon at her most vivid: the dark, urgent lyricism, the insistent physicality". -- The New Times Book Review
"These stories come from...the borderlands, the margins of our affluent culture. They are populated primarily by young people...whose bodies, minds, and spirits are being used up by themselves and by others for the briefest and often most heartbreakingly meager pleasures: a dance with a stranger; breaking into a house and eating pecan pie; a bowl of cherries... The characters give themselves up early and for every reason -- money, fear, to please others -- but never for love or even for their own pleasure. Human bodies here are really never whole, flesh and soul: they are parts, pieces of lives that don't get to be lived... First, Body leaves me completely in awe". -- Christopher Tilghman, Ploughshares
"Melanie Rae Thon proves that she can make the grimmest subjects seem beautiful by the sheer pyrotechnics of her
Synopsis
A distinctive voice marks Melanie Rae Thon's fiction. The nine stories in this new collection are peopled by characters who live on the margins, in landscapes both urban and rural. In the heartbreakingly comic title story, a 326-pound woman in a Seattle morgue pins a Vietnam vet to the floor. In "Necessary Angels", a young girl in Florida reveals the secret dangers of her privileged life: alligators and furious ducks, a crippled grandfather, a burning car. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, Thon's stories set us in the borderlands, in the places where sudden accidents and misguided passions make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life.
Table of Contents
First, body -- Father, lover, deadman, dreamer -- Little white sister -- Nobody's daughters -- The snow thief -- Bodies of water -- Necessary angels.