Holding Pattern
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The world of Jeffery Renard Allen's stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.
The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other's resolve.
In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are "dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings." In "It Shall Be Again," more of a prose poem than a story, characters open their mouths to catch a "thick dirty" rain of pennies. Some stories lack cohesiveness, and although Allen isn't attempting to write traditional pieces, the stories would benefit from coherency. Even in the weaker entries, though, Allen delivers striking images two brothers chewing on wads of toilet paper, a scalp that looks like "watermelon meat chewed down to the rind." It is these images, rather than particular events or characters, that leave the strongest impressions. Though scattered cultural references and spot-on dialogue root these stories mainly in the present, they have a distinct feeling of being outside of time.
