A Primitive Heart
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Tales from the Tony Award–winning playwright: "Not only an exhibition of David Rabe's acclaimed dramatic powers but also proof of his narrative magic" (Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate).
David Rabe, playwright of Hurlyburly and In the Boom Boom Room, brings his intense vision to the world of fiction with a short story collection of astonishing range and versatility. Whether he is writing about a marriage shadowed by the unacknowledged discord of a risky pregnancy, a group of men whose attempt to settle an account launches them toward unexpected violence, or a young journalist who believes he's escaped his Catholic roots only to be forced again to confront them by a priest who once mentored his writing, Rabe's strong, true voice tenders an inimitable portrait of America and offers benediction to her lost souls. A Primitive Heart confirms the mastery of a writer and establishes David Rabe as an exciting voice in fiction.
"Rabe has a way of implicating the reader—of creating a near-claustrophobic bond with his restless characters, writing so convincingly that the subtext becomes almost palpable, accruing darkly, like a storm. Okay: I'm eating my heart out." —Ann Beattie, PEN/Malamud Award–winner
"These are gripping stories, hard to put aside, that cut so close to primitive emotional truths that they can be painful to read . . . That vivid confusion—the desire to understand something more primitive than thought—makes these stories unforgettable." —The Seattle Times
"David Rabe demonstrates in this new collection of short stories that his talent for dialogue is just as dazzling inside a prose narrative as it is on stage." —The Baltimore Sun
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Rabe (Hurlyburly, etc.), in this collection, navigates the troubled lives of men set adrift by economic hopelessness, traumatic childhoods and their own inability to connect. The narrator of the title story becomes obsessed with the development of his unborn child, even as he drifts further apart from his strong-willed wife. "Veranda" describes both the failed beginning of a new relationship and a failed attempt to make amends to a child for the end of an old one. "Holy Men" and "Some Loose Change" stand out as powerful evocations of contemporary manhood, the former in a successful writer's fraught reunion with the Catholic priest who mentored him, the latter through the attempts of a group of boozy dot-com casualties to even an old financial score. "Early Madonna," the only story with a female protagonist, features an aging club kid attempting to escape the shadow of her brainy younger sister. Abstracted inner monologues and minute descriptions sometimes come at the expense of pacing and dialogue in these often multi-chaptered first-person stories, and the solipsism of Rabe's emotionally immature characters blinds them to the reality of their interaction with others. But these stories occasionally tedious but also marked by strikingly good observational prose perceptively sketch the experiences of 21st-century misfits.
