Tacoma Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Richard Wiley is one of our best writers. These stories satisfy in the way that brilliant short fiction always satisfies; one feels as if one has absorbed the expansive vision and drama of a novel. Read slowly, and I bet you’ll want to read again.” —Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Living in the Weather of the World
“It’s a strange and winsome feeling I have, reading Tacoma Stories, the blue sensation that Richard Wiley has made me homesick for a place I’ve never been, mourning the loss of friends I never had, in a life where each and every one of us is loved, however imperfectly. Think Sherwood Anderson inhabiting Raymond Carver’s Northwest and you’ll have a clear picture of Wiley’s accomplishment.” —Bob Shacochis, author of Easy in the Islands and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1968, sixteen people sit in Pat’s Tavern, drink green beer, flirt, rib each other, and eventually go home in (mostly) different directions. In the stories that follow, which span 1958 to the present, Richard Wiley pops back into the lives of this colorful cast of characters—sometimes into their pasts, sometimes into their futures—and explores the ways in which their individual narratives indelibly weave together. At the heart of it all lies Tacoma, Washington, a town full of eccentricities and citizens as unique as they are universal. The Tacoma of Tacoma Stories might be harboring paranoid former CIA operatives and wax replicas of dead husbands, but it is also a place with all the joys and pains one could find in any town, anytime and anywhere.
Richard Wiley is the author of eight novels including Bob Stevenson; Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Washington State Book Award; and Ahmed’s Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California, and Tacoma, Washington.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wiley's antic, wrenching collection of 14 interlocking stories reveals the subtle connections among a dozen characters whose unpredictable lives evolve through the decades in the title city. The first story, "Your Life Should Have Meaning on the Day You Die," takes place on St. Patrick's Day in a formerly popular Tacoma, Wash., bar that has "started on its coast to oblivion." The story stands on its own, but it also introduces the characters who will populate the rest of the volume. Lindy, for example, introduced in the first story as "a woman whose ex was doing time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary," appears in the following one, "A Goat's Breath Carol," as a ninth grader asking her reluctant seventh grader neighbor to "show her his weenie." Ralph, an English teacher in his 50s who plays a minor role in the first story, stars in a story set 10 years later, "Anyone Can Master Grief but He Who Has It." Readers may need to take notes to keep track of the characters and their connections, but that close reading will pay off. The collection provides a tentatively affirmative answer to the question raised by a fictional version of the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth: "Do you think a town can act as a hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart?"
