Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
Intersecting Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Men Giving Money, Women Yelling is Alice Mattisons latest collection in which the characters lives are told in tales that overlap or echo one another. At the center of the stories is Denny Ring, a young man nobody quite knows. Other characters include John Corey, a contractor who renovates old houses in New Haven, Connecticut; his younger brother Eugene, a volunteer at a soup kitchen; and his older brother Cameron, who is a lawyer specializing in obnoxious law. Johns assistant, Tom, is in love with his former English teacher, Ida Feldman, and Charlotte LoPresti, a social worker who interviews the Corey brothers and their aged father, is friends with Pam Shepherd, a social worker whos in charge of the house for psychiatric patients that John and Tom are renovating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Find stories with action, not just love and thinking," a dance teacher tells her students in this endearing collection of intersecting stories, and that direction sums up Mattison's (Hilda and Pearl) modus operandi. Her characters are in constant motion, dancing their way through their days and predicaments, entering and exiting these 15 stories like people in a slightly ironic musical comedy. The cast includes two young women who are high-school teachers (and their boyfriends past and present), three grown brothers, a yogurt-shop owner, two social workers, various dogs and a fey drifter named Denny, who slips in and out of windows and the other characters' lives. Set in and around New Haven, Conn. (in a soup kitchen, a dance studio, a lawyer's office and a city park; in downtown apartments and a cottage on the Long Island Sound), these stories are full of lifelike interruptions, distractions and unexpected turns. If Mattison's spry language and light touch belie her careful framing of events, they also blithely pave the way for her finely hewn endings, which in almost every story capture the unspoken charm and mystery of a character or a moment.
