The Devil's Fingers & Other Personal Essays
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- ¥1,200
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
The Devil’s Fingers and Other Tales is a new collection of personal essays by one of Texas’ master storytellers. The more than two dozen essays in this new collection range from travel pieces about Havana and London to stories about small-town exotics that are funny, nervy, outlandish, all characterized by James Hoggard’s sly wit and his noted openness to people he meets along the way, including a Saturday morning gathering of khaki-dressed men who have hunkered down at a Dairy Queen to get away from their women who want them to spend the day doing chores. At the same time they see Hoggard as a bicycle-riding exotic who finds it normal to go out and bike 60-odd miles before lunch. Now and then the encounters are hair-raising, sometimes scary. Fast-paced, yet at the same time reflective, Hoggard guides his readers into some of the wonderfully strange turns of the world, at least as much as he did in his previous collection, Riding the Wind, which was haled as “one of the best books ever written by a Texan.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wide-ranging essay collection, Hoggard (Riding the Wind), former poet laureate of Texas, explores subjects as diverse as the Hotter'n Hell Hundred (a 100-mile bicycle race through Texas, in August), the Battle of Marathon, flyfishing, Cuban politics, and the seemingly unyielding Devil's Fingers canyons in the Chihuahuan Desert. The first few essays are set in small-town Texas, but Hoggard soon takes readers to Paris, where he considers the city's landmarks and the history they represent. Hoggard is an avid runner and bicyclist, and often uses his exertions as a starting point for observation. "On runs and on paper I'm a wanderer," he writes, and his essays follow in the meandering tradition of Montaigne. One might begin with skeet shooting and end up considering "the frontier tradition of keeping distance from soft emotions." The weakest essays take this meandering to the extreme and become too diffuse, but the book's highlights blend motion, reflection, action, history, thought, and drive in surprising ways that will make readers reconsider how to move through this changing world.
