The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
One of “the best writers of our time” (Ann Patchett) offers this hilarious yet haunting cycle of stories—all previously uncollected.
Since the explosive publication of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus has dazzled readers as “the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation” (John Cheever). He has been praised as "one of America’s preeminent novelists, our prime conductor of electric sentences" (William Giraldi). Above all, Allan Gurganus is a seriously funny writer, an expert at evoking humor, especially in our troubled times.
Now he offers nine classic tales—never before between covers. They attest to his mastery of the short story and the growing depth of his genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition—masked and unmasked—as we live it now. “Once upon a time” collides with the everyday. We meet a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their family dog from Maine’s fierce undertow. A virginal seventy-eight-year-old grammar school librarian has her sole erotic experience with a polyamorous snake farmer. A vicious tornado sends twin boys aloft, leaving only one of them alive. And, in an eerily prescient story, cholera strikes a rural village in 1849 and citizens come to blame their doomed young doctor who saved hundreds.
These meticulously crafted parables recall William Faulkner’s scope and Flannery O’Connor’s corrosive wit. Imbuing each story with charged drama, Gurganus, a sublime ventriloquist, again proves himself among our funniest writers and our wisest.
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Gurganus's vital collection (after Lost Souls) portrays small-town Americans, mostly oddballs and misfits, at moments of self-discovery as recounted in their own authentic voices. Several stories take place in fictional Falls, N.C., once called "the Athens of This Far into Eastern North Carolina," according to the tour guide in "The Deluxe Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC)." Small-town residents like Falls' know each other's secrets and relish the telling. In "The Mortician Confesses," a 60-year-old undertaker has sex with a corpse, and the man's sad story is colorfully told by the cop who caught him. In "Unassisted Human Flight," a reporter investigates a local legend of a man said to have flown almost a mile as a boy of eight. The characters can also be heroic, as when a 65-year-old widower rescues his neighbors during Hurricane Floyd in "Fourteen Feet of Water in my House," and an Ivy League doctor saves a Midwestern town from cholera in "The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor," set during the 1850s. Among the greatest entries in this stellar work are "My Heart Is a Snake Farm," featuring a spinster whose life in a crumbling Florida motel brightens when a slippery charmer opens a reptile tourist attraction, and "He's at the Office," which details a son's efforts to help his 80-year-old father, a WWII veteran mentally stuck in the 1940s. Simultaneously funny and compassionate, literary and lowbrow, Gurganus's stories trawl the mysteries of the human heart and surface with wonderful results.