Home is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries.
Home is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect toleranc...
Providence--a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants--provides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is a novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a so-so job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and...
Providence--a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants--provides Jea...
Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport's acclaimed Da Vinci's Bicycle. The series was launched with two guiding principles: to publish works of short fiction exhibiting formal excellence and strong emotional appeal and to publish writers at all stages of their careers.
So the Story Goes gathers the best short fiction of the series, works exhibiting wit, elegance, and wisdom. Writing about a wide variety of subjects and in a multitude of styles, the twenty...
Since its founding in 1979, the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction series has published forty volumes of short fiction, beginning with Guy Davenport'...
A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry's No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in -Strong Boy, - this might be -...because every family, rich or poor, is roughage.-
The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin.
A section is devoted to...
A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry's No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had con...
