Male of the Species
Stories
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Pushcart Prize–winning author’s acclaimed story collection about fathers, sons, and “masculinity’s unwritten dos and don’ts” (Publishers Weekly).
The title story of this highly praised book, about a small-town Texas science teacher threatening to flunk his high school’s brilliantly talented football star, sets the collection’s timely theme, the conflict between the image of how American men are supposed to act and the way they secretly feel like acting.
This theme is skillfully modulated in almost all of the book’s eleven selections—from “Stories of the Hunt,” about a boy discovering that his ostensibly he-man woodsman father doesn’t in fact know the first thing about tracking deer, to “Immigration,” about a Vietnamese refugee working in a Las Vegas casino and dreaming of becoming the worlds greatest Elvis impersonator.
Alex Mindt seems instinctively to know all the angles of story-telling, from quickly building dramatic tension to creating vivid characters through a minimum of dialogue. His every turn of phrase smolders in the reader’s mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pushcart Prize winner Mindt deftly captures in his debut collection men, and those around them, as they negotiate moral binds rooted in masculinity's unwritten dos and don'ts. A high school chemistry teacher transplanted from Wisconsin to West Texas flunks the star quarterback and incurs the wrath of the townsfolk and eventually transforms his marriage in the title story. In "Stories of the Hunt," a 12-year-old boy on his first deer-hunting expedition with his father recognizes that his father lied about his experience as a courageous woodsman. The African-American dentist of "An Artist at Work" recognizes too late that his decision to move his family from Boston to a Norman Rockwell suburb has fatally alienated his teenage artist son. Similarly, in "Free Spirits," a grown son has to come to terms with his psychotic hospitalized father, who can be as violent as he is sympathetic. Mindt does not present easy choices for his characters, like the heartbroken elderly Mexican-American father in the beautifully composed opener, "Sabor a Mi": he treks to Taos, N.Mex., on the occasion of his adored daughter's marriage to another woman. Though his characters are distinct, Mindt concentrates less on people than on their conflicts, and the resulting discord is tense and surprising throughout.
