The Peaceable Kingdom
Stories
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Eleven "impeccably crafted, painfully hilarious" tales of innocence lost and families in search of connection from the New York Times–bestselling author (San Francisco Chronicle).
A reluctant trophy wife on her Italian honeymoon; a young woman in love with her sister's dead boyfriend; a lonely puppeteer flirting with the hostess of a children's party; a teenage girl traveling to Paris with her father and, unexpectedly, his young girlfriend. Francine Prose's characters inhabit a world of rich emotion and startling clarity, searching for connection in a world full of surprise and humor; they travel, love, break up, and start again. Even their animal companions—a gecko rescued from a wild party, a dog who bites a bride, a hamster who dies unexpectedly and sends a family on a journey to give it a proper funeral—shine with the emotional complexity and sly satire that make Prose's work such a joy to experience.
In this collection, the New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award finalist demonstrates the craft, humor, and piercing human insight that make her, in the words of Gary Shteyngart "one of a handful of truly indispensable American writers."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prose ( Primitive People ; Household Saints ) is a highly talented writer who in this collection of stories--most of them previously published in little magazines--seems to be seeking a subject. They are mostly about young, fairly sophisticated people in a vaguely artistic milieu who are profoundly at odds with each other and their world. Prose has a marvelous ear for the inanities of contemporary dialogue, and is continuously observant; there is never a time when she bores the reader or causes impatience, and she is often very funny. But readers will likely come away with little more than cool admiration for her intelligence and her rueful insights. In ``Amazing,'' for instance, a young puppeteer does his work at a party in the house of a wealthy and clearly dysfunctional family, only to be drawn into an odd and not very convincing encounter with the father of the household; in ``Potato World,'' a bright, disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased there by her hapless boyfriend, with disastrous results; ``Rubber Life'' is a sort of ghost story about a librarian and her best customer that ends, as so many of these stories do, with a symbolist flourish that is effective in itself but seems unrelated to what has gone before. Read one at a time these stories would probably seem more hip and entertaining than they do as a collection, where their similarities and frequent glibness are more apparent.
