Red Car
Stories
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A dozen “vibrant . . . strikingly perceptive” stories about love—romantic, familial, comedic, and tragic, by the celebrated novelist and playwright (Booklist).
Crossing a range of landscapes and eras, spanning age and gender, and circling taboos with a sly wit, “these 12 luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. There is not a false note in Bingham’s striking collection” (Publishers Weekly).
In “A Gift for Burning” a woman regrets wasting all her energy on getting married, getting unmarried, and getting married again; “That Winter” introduces us to a woman writer in a Colorado cabin, isolated by the brutal weather, and liberated by a mysterious guest; in “Sagesse,” an American family gets a startling awakening while vacationing on the beaches of Normandy after World War II; the fearsome and tiring demands of matrimony are exposed in “Porn”; “Sweet Peas” exquisitely seizes on one single precious moment that destroys a couple’s budding romance; and in the title story, the eponymous ‘65 Pontiac comes to symbolize the inevitable end of a marriage.
Praised for her “skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty . . . and their “unblinking gaze”, Red Car is Sallie Bingham at her masterful best (The New York Times Book Review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these 12 luminous stories from former National Book Critics Circle director Bingham (Transgressions) feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. The four-time married mother of a successful novelist in "A Gift for Burning" justifies to an interviewer everything from her selections for stand-in fathers to enabling her son's substance abuse all, she admits, because she was too distracted at the time to pay much attention to him. "That Winter" imagines a lone woman writer "of no particular age" braving it out in isolated southern Colorado until an emergency brings the welcome warmth, and gradual love, of an undemanding stranger. Several of the stories are set in France, such as "Sagesse," which involves an American family vacationing in Normandy at the close of the WWII. Yet the most exotic locale remains the quiet neighborhood in sunny Florida of the title story, where the eponymous red '65 Pontiac convertible rests at the curb after innumerable changes in ownership over the years, telling the story of the end of a marriage. There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection.
