The Truly Needy And Other Stories
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
These nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and “quality-of-life” campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy Honig's fiction, one is willingly drawn into an intimacy with these resilient, but flawed characters—among them, a woman who cleans a beauty salon, a high school kid who’s lost a parent, a runaway Cambodian bride, an actress, and a homeless woman. Crossing paths, these difficult characters often misunderstand and sometimes demean each other, yet they also redeem and rescue one other in odd and unexpected ways. In The Truly Needy, Lucy Honig has created a heartbreaking, imaginative world that is the American urban landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nine stories, set mostly in New York City, make up Honig's second collection, brimming with complex, vividly drawn characters teetering precariously between alienation and empathy, displacement and communion, despair and perseverance. One heartbreaking tale features Maria, a Guatemalan immigrant whose diligence in English-language class doesn't clarify the bizarre values of the American culture now familiar to her children. Honig keenly captures the protagonist's confusion at being made a public spectacle on a televised political schmooze fest with the mayor. Characters confront identity crises in contrasting social milieus, as in "No Friends, All Strangers," in which a cagey assistant in a small hair salon endures the wearying chitchat of wealthy clients, or "Sights of Cork," where a despairing Irishman on the brink of suicide befriends a traveling American college girl and accompanies her on a tour of his native turf, including the spot where an accident changed his life. World-weary New York office workers counsel a young Cambodian virgin before her arranged marriage in the title story, and, in the most startling contrast of all, a movie star, her director and crew shoot a commercial for a perfume called (as is the story) "Dispossessed" on the streets, using homeless people as extras. Convincing detail and candid, insightful narrative draw the reader deep into the lives of these ordinary people and their sometimes extraordinary revelations. Honig (Picking Up) permeates the collection with a quirky hopefulness in the resilience of these memorable characters and their unexpected moments of human connection--even as they struggle, with quiet heroism, to make their place in a modern world they can neither control nor explain. FYI: The Truly Needy won the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
