Between My Father and the King
New and Uncollected Stories
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
This brand new collection of 28 short stories spans the length of Frame's career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories have been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in Between My Father and the King.
The piece 'Gorse is Not People' caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953.
In these stories readers will recognize familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acclaimed New Zealander Frame (1924 2004) left behind a legacy of exceptional writing, both fiction and nonfiction, and this new collection of 28 short stories that span her career (many of which have never been published) showcases her extraordinary gifts as an imaginative storyteller with a singular viewpoint. Frame grasps an image and the emotion behind it in a few spare words. In "The Plum Tree and the Hammock," she inhabits the mind of a young girl whose heart belongs to a boy who "cycled by in a flash of handsome pallor on his black and silver bicycle." And in "The Birds of the Air," she describes the anticipation of a grandmother's visit: "an excitement like Christmas enhanced our lives." Even the weather, in "I Got a Shoes," is transformed by Frame's lovely vision: "It rained big drops, pelting down hard like a punishment." The chilling observations of "A Night at the Opera," where a building housing "disturbed" patients is viewed as "a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food"; and "Gorse is not People," whose heartbreaking Naida a woman institutionalized for being a dwarf believes that by turning 21 she can leave the mental hospital where she's been housed for 11 years, were clearly inspired by the author's own time in a mental institution. These stories with themes of despair, disappointment, and wonder, underscored by Frame's melancholy and vivid turns of phrase are beautifully rendered.
