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How Far She Went
Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger, longing—sometimes worse—lie just below the surface of a pleasant summer afternoon or a Sunday church service. In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby" and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide." But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that made him worth the trouble he caused." The title story in the ...
Familiar Heat
"Set on the Florida coast, in the small fishing town of Sanavere, Familiar Heat spans a few years in the lives of an assortment of characters, each precisely and vividly imagined - hardworking shrimpers, net menders, and fishermen; priests; shopkeepers; and a vibrant community of Cuban exiles still reliving - after thirty years - the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Against this background, we follow several interconnected marriages in various kinds of trouble." "At the center is the marriage of Faye Parry, a beguiling young woman, and Vic Rios, captain of a Cuban charter boat and reformed rake ("that devil in a blue shirt," Faye's mother calls him). As the novel opens, Faye is on the way into the bank w...
And Venus Is Blue
Although Hood is considered a "Southern" writer, her sensibilities are universal. In this impressive collection of short fiction, she uses simple phrases to capture a character perfectly; at the same time, she knows when to unleash her controlled prose, freeing it for poetic evocations of landscapes or moments. Above all, she tells good stories. "After Moore" traces the dissolution of a marriage as told to a marriage counselor by all the family members. Hood manages to be both funny and perceptive as she adopts the voice of each character in turn. The title piece is an ambitious novella in which Hood's experiments with time do not quite work, but she deftly renders a family's complex relationships and at the same time creates the ambience of a mill-town community. Hood, who won the 1984 Flannery O'Connor Award for her first book of stories, How Far She Went, is a talented writer with a distinctive, memorable voice.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
DIVDIVTracing her moral struggles to the day she accidentally took a sip of water before her Communion—a mortal sin—Mary McCarthy gives us eight funny and heartrending essays about the illusive and redemptive nature of memory/divDIV “During the course of writing this, I’ve often wished that I were writing fiction.”/divDIV Originally published in large part as standalone essays in the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, Mary McCarthy’s acclaimed memoir begins with her recollections of a happy childhood cut tragically short by the death of her parents during the influenza epidemic of 1918./divDIV Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much...
Girlz 'n the Hood
Girlz in the Hood is the unsentimental, moving, and surprisingly humorous account of a girl and her ten siblings who grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Mary's mother was a fierce matriarch, a single mom who raised eleven children with the help of welfare checks and a fire arm hidden in her bra. Drugs, guns, and pregnancies were everyday occurrences, but Mary and her siblings took it all in stride, spying on the grown-ups, playing in the streets, and helping to take care of the new babies when they were born. The dubious yet colorful cast of characters that came into their lives (the Jehovah Witnesses, the whores, the addicts, the "fathers"), and the never-ending ser...
Soon
The award-winning author’s “gorgeously-crafted second collection of stories” explores moments of profound loss, discovery, and transition (Charlotte Observer). The stories in this volume explore the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters—science, religion, family, self—the powerful act of storytelling keeps their broken lives together. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all. The title story—chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology—follows two...
A Clear View of the Southern Sky
Stories of women on the edge pursuing happiness through courage and human connection.
How Far She Went
Tells the stories of a family reunion, a musician's fan, an unhappy marriage, a dying man, a fugitive, and a woman and her rebellious granddaughter
