Plan B for the Middle Class
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- US$12.99
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- US$12.99
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In The News of the World, Ron Carlson's celebrated last collection, it was widely noted that the news was good. Here, as everybody goes to Plan B, the news is stronger, edgy, and bittersweet.
Here are men and women in the middle--of life, of relationships. There is a difference between what they set out for and what they get. A single mother keeps house on an aircraft carrier. A new father finds himself seduced by a motorcycle. A lonely professor is forced to face a few truths. Braced by honesty and lifted by affection for the world, these stories are a stunning showcase for a writer tackling universal themes in new ways. Get ready: when Plan A breaks down, Ron Carlson is here.
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Carlson's winning new collection of short fiction issues from a sensibility set ever so slightly--and variously--askew. His range swings from a surreal monologue by a typical-sounding mother who apparently lives with her children on an aircraft carrier (``On the U.S.S. Fortitude '') to the emotionally disarming lead story ``Hartwell,'' a powerful depiction of the protagonist's self-humiliation as he seeks an end to his loneliness. The author's capacity for such variety is itself disarming; these 11 stories include as well the marginally amusing trifle ``Fort Bragg: How Subliminal Advertising Changed My Life,'' and a more conventional, taut tale of a father attempting to understand his unhappy son's death in Alaska (``Blazo''). It is as if Carlson ( The News of the World ) had expressly set himself a different goal for each tale--long, short, goofy or deadly serious. His expansive talent yields success in all, the best being the first and the last--the title story, about a man reviewing how the past has gotten him to his present, which leads him to reassess where to go from there.
