At The Jim Bridger
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"We lean closer and closer, eager to catch every last word." said The New York Times Book Review. "Bigger, richer, funnier, and more complex than any description of them can convey," said the San Francisco Chronicle. "Some of the funniest and saddest stories ever to cozy up together," said the Los Angeles Times. Welcome to the short stories of Ron Carlson, where strange beach towels turn up in your living room; where the ordinary son of a family of geniuses spins a rollicking tale of happiness and disappointment; where a teenaged magician seduces the prettiest girl in his high school and the world, with devastating consequences. Long regarded as one of our finest living short story writers, Ron Carlson triumphantly returns with At the Jim Bridger, nine stories that are epic in scope and confessional in tone; stories that enfold the reader in a world of love and mystery, and make us feel better than just about anything written on the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this taut, focused collection, veteran short story writer Carlson (The Hotel Eden) captures the ordinary occurrences that define our lives. Sharing graceful, unadorned prose and elegant metaphors, the nine stories and two brief sketches collected here portray characters at moments when the solid ground of reality slips out from under them. High school figures prominently: for Carlson, the teenage years offer the perfect transitional moments, when minor incidents are writ large. Fortunately, he depicts these mundane experiences a boy's first date ("The Potato Gun"), his first fistfight ("At Copper View"), his first car ("The Ordinary Son") with neither condescension nor irony, but a mixture of serious reflection and na ve wonder. In "The Ordinary Son," Reed's average intelligence in a family of geniuses makes him its only distinctive member; he amazes his young brother, who is practicing quantum physics with crayons, with the simple pleasure of his brand-new car. Elsewhere, the teenager's unique sense of alienation is a chronic condition: in "Towel Season," Edison's absorbing interest in a highly theoretical engineering project separates him from the neighborhood husbands and wives; in the title story, Donner's recounting of a near-death incident on a camping trip leads to a brief connection between him and a woman who is not his wife. With a precision and consistency rarely achieved in similar collections, this volume should earn Carlson continued, well-deserved recognition. National advertising; author tour.