The Missouri Review (To the Edge) Volume XIX Number 1 1996 - Couverture souple

Maxwell, William

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1879758164 ISBN 13 : 9781879758162

Editeur : The Curators of the University of Missouri, 1996

Synopsis

The Found Text feature in this issue is a never-before-published, full-length play by Tennessee Williams, WILL MR. MERRIWETHER RETURN FROM MEMPHIS? It seems especially appropriate for THE MISSOURI REVIEW to be publishing a Williams play, since, while Williams was born in Mississippi, he was raised partly in Missouri and served much of his literary apprenticeship here. He even came to the University of Missouri in the early '30s--and stayed long enough to develop a solid dislike for journalism (it didn't let him write enough) and to fail ROTC not one but three times.

Produced once but never published, WILL MR. MERRIWETHER RETURN FROM MEMPHIS? is more artful than forceful; yet it has the appeal of being pure Williams and the added interest, for those of us at THE MISSOURI REVIEW, of local allusions. Lights above the thrust stage spell out "Tiger Town," a seedy district where one of the minor characters hangs out. And in Act I, Scene V, there's a mention of the Hinkson Creek (Williams calls it Hinksons), which winds through Columbia, and for which a street is also named.

Williams' first major success would not come until 1944, with THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Nostalgic and undisguisedly autobiographical, it is the play, along with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for which Williams is best known. But these two masterpieces represent only a tiny fraction of the author's work. In a career that spanned almost forty years, Williams wrote scores of plays and published numerous nondramatic works: short stories; two poetry collections; two novellas; a novel and, finally, in 1975, his memoirs. His output was prodigious. Still, it's his plays that have really counted. Of the three playwrights who did the most to advance American drama, Arthur Miller was the moralist; Eugene O'Neill the metaphysician; and Williams was the dramatist of passions, expanding the emotional range of the theatre in plays as tender as THE GLASS MENAGERIE, as steamy as STREETCAR and as violently gothic as SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH.

A propos du livre

From the Publisher

In this issue's prose, the stakes are high. Characters come to crossroads almost as dramatic as in the legend of Robert Johnson and the devil. In Deborah Way's Editors' Prize-winning story "You Think I Care," a teenage girl, who thinks she is invulnerable, runs smack against the fact that she isn't. The story depicts the phenomenal mental agility with which the teenager tries to hold onto her self-image no matter what. In Lloyd Zimpel's amazing historically set story "Beiderman and the Hard Words," the fates mistake the patriarch of a pioneering family for Indiana Jones and keep imposing challenges, almost comical in their extremity, on him and his family, testing them beyond all reasonable limits. Lauren Slater's personal essay "Black Swans" describes equally bizarre calamities of a psychological sort as Slater relates her own experience with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Adults in love can be almost as helpless and vulnerable as kids, as is the case for Nancy Kincaid's smitten middle-aged professor in "Why Richard Can't." Kincaid seems to wonderfully empathize with her male protagonist as he wrestles with the question of whether he should stick with the unfulfilling known or take a leap into the promising unknown. Paula Huston's "Serenissima" depicts a similarly powerful attraction, a woman's love for a place that represents freedom and romance to her but where she encounters something so unexpected and incongruous that it haunts her for life.

Jon Billman's story "When We Were Wolves" and Scott Boylston's "Captains By Default" concern boys' games and how they can get out of control. Both are about that thin line between playing by the rules and terrible destruction, how often we may skate up to the line, flirt with it, almost cross it--or indeed do so and change our lives forever.

Kathy Fagan's Editors' Prize-winning poems are very much crossroads poems that explore emotional thresholds and paths not taken. Our other poets--Liz Rosenberg, Kevin Stein and Julia Wendell--all write about the influences of family relationships--failed, sucessful or stricken--that dominate fate and personality, pushing the sense of self and security to the edge.

David Morrill's essay, "The One Strong Flower I Am," another Editors' Prize winner, acquaints us with the nebulous, confusing job of working with "at risk" children, many of whom come from worlds that are already over the line. They live surrounded by choices between bad and awful, but Morrill is intrigued less by their edginess and confusion than by their relative decency and their capability, even in the midst of chaos, for creativity.

William Maxwell's interview by Kay Bonetti is one of the most entertaining we've seen in some time. It tells of a long life of writing and editing. Maxwell is a short-story writer and novelist of the first order, who went to work at the New Yorker in 1936 at a salary of $35 a week, and over the next four decades became an important behind-the-scenes editorial influence on American fiction.

Hearty congratulations to this year's Editors' Prize winners, Deborah Way, Donald Morrill and Kathy Fagan. And special congratulations to last year's Editors' Prize fiction winner, Deborah Galyan, whose winning story, "The Incredible Appearing Man" has just been selected for the upcoming edition of BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The Curators of the University of Missouri
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1879758164
• ISBN 13: 9781879758162
• Reliure: Paperback
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 192
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible