Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
In this, his third collection of stories, Lester Goran moves us again through the times and places indelibly stamped with his wit and insight about people and events lost to history. As with his earlier collections, Tales from the Irish Club and She Loved Me Once and Other Stories, Outlaws of the Purple Cow centers around the domains of Irish-American men and women in Pittsburgh. Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. Goran's evocative settings and narratives range from the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy to richly detailed realism: the bewildering ceremony enacted on a suburban lawn on Good Friday; an inventory of the loves of a lifetime compiled on scraps of paper and matchbook covers; the young man home on leave from the army who encounters a woman whose entire life is reflected in the wires holding together her threadbare Christmas tree; and the young man on the first day of his first job who delivers roses to a house where the homeowner had died since ordering the flowers. Goran, with his mastery of language and images, chronicles in stories the unheralded laughters and sorrows of Americans seldom noted in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The blue-collar Irish neighborhoods of Pittsburgh during the WWII era come to life in this quirky, uneven collection of stories from Goran, the author of nine novels (Bing Crosby's Last Song) and two previous books of short fiction. Goran has a knack for creating seemingly ordinary characters who behave strangely, and he's at his best when taking a fairly conventional setup and twisting it in odd directions. In "Jenny and the Episcopalian," a young woman looking for love stumbles into a satisfying short-term relationship with a ghost. A heroic man who rescues several people from a bus accident in "Keeping Count" is shocked into wondering what his own last thoughts would have been. Feeling that "an accounting was in order" for his own life, he mentally lists almost 100 women with whom he had sex and finds himself musing on the confusing loneliness that followed. The characters of "The Chorus Girl" are out on a limb when a man falls in love with the surrogate his infertile wife recruits to conceive a child. Some stories have promising openers, but fall flat on the follow-through. "Guest on Good Friday" is a quasi-comical tale of fastidious newlyweds who try to get a pushy atheist and his unwieldy rolls of secondhand carpet out of their house. The dialogue is inexplicably stilted, and the moralizing end leaves the piece inchoate. The intriguing premise of "An Old Man and Three Whores" stumbles into sentimentality when a widowed senior citizen shocks his family and neighbors by becoming a caretaker and confidant for three ladies of the evening. Nonetheless, Goran's solid writing features earthy dialogue and places emphasis on the nuances of social settings and class contexts, bringing much to offer readers with an interest in working-class, Irish-American Catholic culture.
