Someone to Crawl Back to - Couverture souple

Gardner, Phillip

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 188642098X ISBN 13 : 9781886420984

Editeur : Boson Books, 1900

Synopsis

SOMEONE TO CRAWL BACK TO is a novel-in-stories, a collection of hearts in search of what they¿ve always wanted or what they¿ve eternally lost. Set in small town South Carolina, those hearts belong to wrecker drivers, drive-thru fast food workers, college professors, bartenders, insurance and mobile homes salesmen. Their common ground is The Paradise Lounge. The death of a marriage, Joshua and Rene Serverance¿s, forms the spine of the book, but included in this small community of seekers are George Scarborough and his softball-playing wife; Evander Baker, who helps his sister bury a bag of chocolate chip cookies near the septic line; and Warren Oxendine, whose wife buys a vibrator at a yard sale. Structured more like a Robert Altman film than a traditional novel, reading SOMEONE TO CRAWL BACK TO is like going to The Paradise Lounge for a drink, slipping inside a patron¿s skin, going home with that person, then coming back to The Paradise and leaving with another sojourner of love.

A propos du livre

Book Description

This first book of stories is a stunning debut for Phillip Gardner. Gardner's characters live on the edge and without aspirations. They strip us of our pretenses because they have none and recognize none. Their virtue and fascination are that they go about the gritty business of living. They are authentic and therefore heartrending.

Dick Croy, Literary Agent

Reading Someone To Crawl Back To, Phillip Gardner's collection of nineteen haunting short stories, is like happening on a neighborhood bar a few miles and a quarter of a century this side of Raymond Carverville, slipping inside the patrons' skins and going home with them for a while, only to return inexorably after each unforgettable visit to home base at that same damn bar, the beginning and end of these boozy and bleary life cycles.

Gardner's genius is in making readers value our fictional incarnations as denizens of his gimlet-eyed view of contemporary rural South Carolina: people most of us would avoid in real life. This isn't "Cheers" territory--Gardner's mise-en-scene is the gritty apotheosis of the pejorative "small town." Yet it is for this very reason that his stories resonate so. Embodying traits and personalities that make them unattractive but not unlike ourselves, these losers in the game of life have things to teach us we're not likely to learn elsewhere. We recognize in them what we disavow in ourselves.

As Gardner writes in his preface: "We form alliances. We find friends and leave them or they leave us. We marry and unmarry, see our children by the calendar. We wonder what happens to them, and maybe about what happens to us. We experience chance exhilarations.... But the heart won't completely yield. It goes on searching for itself, blindly if necessary. It gives us things to think about on its way, stories to tell."

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Boson Books
• Date d'édition: 1900
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 188642098X
• ISBN 13: 9781886420984
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 164
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne