UNITED STATES AUTHOR · EXPERIMENTAL FICTION · FICTION
Donald Barthelme
Time's up, she thought.
— from Paradise
Most acclaimed
Paradise
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed . . . The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women."In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.From the Hardcover edition.
Short stories
For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections - The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors - as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before. In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed - for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life - to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance...A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's pre-occupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose - the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats's assertion that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity' has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat - passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery I've found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter - and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act.". There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories - many of them set in Reynolds Price's native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas," the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons," and a number in Europe - will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.