Dancing in the Movies
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Encompassing a vast gamut of personalities, situations, and emotions, these stories penetrate our motives for doing what is right. Often there is no right or wrong, and the characters’ motives for the choices they make are as diverse as the childhood memories they cherish and abhor. In the end, this book probes individual impulse and responsibility, creating stories so unerringly authentic that they become—irrepressibly—part of everyone who reads them.
“The Darkness of Love” narrates three days in the life of a black policeman, distressed by his inner fears of racism and irresistibly attracted by his wife’s sister. In “Dancing in the Movies” a college student returns to his hometown, where he finds his girlfriend—a heroin addict—and tries to convince her to overcome her habit. There are stories of men at war, of lovers trying to begin a relationship, of others trying to sustain their love. Each story revolves around characters with a choice to make, and Robert Boswell renders these characters in all of their fine, vulnerable, and relentless attributes.
With this prize-winning collection, Boswell proves himself a mature craftsperson, weaving stories both poignant and profound. Each story is a vision of life, alternately dark and joyous, gritty and hopeful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Six dexterously shaped stories make up this volume, winner of the 1985 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction. Boswell's believable characters are involved in situations that are sometimes painfully true-to-life. One story concerns an American soldier who loses both feet while fighting in the Korean War; another tells of a black New York City policeman who visits his in-laws in Tennessee, where he is tormented by his fear that he is a racist and by the discovery that he loves his wife's sister. The author's ability to create affecting relationships is evident in such entries as "Kentucky,'' which deals with the growing pains of three brothers, and the title story, in which a young man returns home from college and tries to save his girlfriend from her destructive lifestyle. A satisfying, if at times disturbing, collection. January