Emperor of the Air
Stories
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning, bestselling debut collection of “beautifully crafted stories” from the acclaimed author of The Doubter’s Almanac (Chicago Sun-Times).
Highly acclaimed and wildly successful upon its debut, Ethan Canin’s now classic collection of nine stories combines exquisite precision, humor, and a rare maturity of observation, capturing those miraculous moments when life opens up and presents itself to us. Full of life, rich with personal history, plot, and revelation, the stories in Emperor of the Air are the work of an extraordinarily gifted young writer.
Capturing a wide range of vivid characters and their unforgettable moments of ache, epiphany, humor, and wisdom, Canin would go on to prove himself as “the most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation” (NPR).
“Dazzling . . . at times breathtaking, at other times heartbreaking.” —Walker Percy
“A glowing first book . . . An engrossing and unified collection.” —Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canin's outstanding debut, winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, gathers nine stories originally published in the Atlantic, Esquire and Ploughshares, among others; two were selected for the Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1986. At 27, the gifted author, a Harvard Medical School student who was a creative writing instructor and an Iowa Review editor, informs a technical expertise with a keen sense of the dynamics of the human psyche. His far-reaching vision encompasses "The Year of Getting to Know Us,'' where the protagonist recognizes in himself aspects of his father's disturbing uncommunicativeness, and ``American Beauty,'' where a teenager cannot escape his bitter older brother's grim prescription of life's inevitabilities: ``You're going to turn into a son of a bitch, just like me.'' Several of the marvelous tales showcase love's singular, redemptive powers: an elderly couple revives their comatose relationship in ``We Are Nighttime Travelers''; a daughter bribes a guard to release her mother who is caught shoplifting in ``Pitch Memory''; and a straight-arrow husband lies for his wife in ``Where We Are Now.'' With a fine attention to detail, Canin continually surprises readers as he casts the mundane in new light (for example, the young narrator of ``Star Food'' unloads bags of potato chips in their aluminum racks ``as if I were putting children to sleep in their beds'').
