Marine Park
Stories
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
• Recipient of a 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention •
“Chiusano . . . [has] formidable talents. It will be worth watching what he does when he leaves the neighborhood.”—John Williams, The New York Times
“[A] cult classic." —Our Town
An astute, lively, and heartfelt debut story collection by an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction
Marine Park—in the far reaches of Brooklyn, train-less and tourist-free—finds its literary chronicler in Mark Chiusano. Chiusano’s dazzling stories delve into family, boyhood, sports, drugs, love, and all the weird quirks of growing up in a tight-knit community on the edge of the city. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is a poignant and piercing collection—announcing the arrival of a distinct new voice in American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this flawed but promising debut collection of 17 interconnected stories, 23-year-old Chiusano revisits his native Brooklyn specifically, Marine Park. The neighborhood, distinguished by its salt marshes, canals, and large waterfront park, serves as the collection's focal point, bringing together a multigenerational cast of characters. They include a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project in "Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away"; an ex-high school basketball star turned gun-toting drug dealer in "Ed Monahan's Game"; and the brothers Jamison and Lorris Favero, whom we follow from adolescence in the early 2000s to adulthood in the present, in eight of the stories. In two of them, "Heavy Lifting" and "Open Your Eyes," Chiusano is at his best, carefully delineating sibling relationships and building tension. Other stories, however, such as "For You" and "We Were Supposed," lack any drama beyond a vague longing for the past. And Chiusano's prose, intimate and limpid (windblown snow creates "sheet-fingers over the layer of frost"), rely too much on easy metaphors such as the extremes of weather heat waves, blizzards, and torrential rain to compensate for under-plotted narratives.
