Temporary Shelter
Short Stories
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A book of profound and candid stories by one of America’s best novelists
Temporary Shelter is a collection of twenty expertly crafted short stories by Mary Gordon. The characters here are of diverse ages, classes, and nationalities, yet all are alike in their desperate need of safe harbor. A crippled girl must contend not only with disability, but also with her toxic mother and aunts, who block her on the path to maturity. Elsewhere, a woman afflicted by a fearful anxiety that has given her a “death in life” grapples with how not to pass the same curse on to her daughter.
As in Gordon’s acclaimed novels, these stories dissect fraught relationships between men and women, from the shattering effects of divorce to marriages turned numb and cold. Skillfully and empathetically plumbing her characters’ depths, Gordon yields rare catharsis with Temporary Shelter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 22 stories that make up this distinguished collection reaffirm Gordon's ability to create fully dimensional characters who speak in a variety of authentic voices. Though the narratives are poetically compressed, Gordon eschews minimalism and uses incident to sustain narrative energy. In a trio of linked vignettes, "Eileen,'' ``Agnes'' and ``Delia,'' and in ``The Neighborhood'' and ``The Friends of the O'Reilley's'' Gordon shows once again that she understands her Irish characters to their very souls, and she subtly conveys the hold of religion on their subconscious. Many of the stories are seen through the eyes of children trying to fathom ``the incomprehensible maze of adult life''; in one, a little girl imagines she has a thorn in her heart in which she has captured her dead father's voice. The strongest stories, notably ``Now I Am Married'' and ``Out of the Fray,'' are about women who have known or who fear the agonizing limbo of divorce, the sundering of relationships, the final abandonment of death. In most of the tales, their protagonists learn costly lessons about their futures, gaining insights into the ``pain and trouble'' of life; the young boy of the title story is anguished when his concept of security is wrenched away. ``A Writing Lesson,'' an ironic analysis of modern fiction, closes the collection.
