Scar Vegas: And Other Stories - Hardcover

Paine, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004897 ISBN 13: 9780151004898

Publisher: Harcourt, 2000

Synopsis

With explosive narrative skill, Tom Paine pulls you into the worlds of a cross-dressing Army general, a confused lowlife being offered an incredible opportunity, and a despairing man whose mother hates him for no reason. Paine's stories feature exotic locales and take you on adventures you never imagined. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Playboy, Harper's, and Zoetrope and has received O. Henry awards, prizes from the Boston Review and Pushcart, and a National Magazine award, and has been optioned for film productions. Like Ernest Hemingway, Robert Stone, Richard Ford, and Russell Banks, Tom Paine grips the reader with his passion and vision.

About this title

Review:

An urban legend making the rounds goes something like this: a guy accepts a drink from a good-looking woman in an airport bar and, three hours later, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney. This apocryphal tale of involuntary black-market organ donors figures in the title story of Tom Paine's debut collection, Scar Vegas. But though a purloined kidney provides a twist, Paine has already delivered the knock-out punch much earlier as he catalogs the black comedy of errors dogging the marriage of Janey "Fruit" Loop to semipro football player Breezy Bonaventure. At the center of the nuptial confusion is Johnny Loop, ex-con brother of the bride and the tale's narrator: "We are the Loops. Someone sure as hell is Fruit if you are the Loops." As he negotiates his sister's beer-guzzling fiancé and the fiancé's belligerent teammates, Johnny maintains his sang-froid: "I ain't never surprised. This world ain't never sprung nothing on me. Some people get themselves hit by lightning and other strange things but that ain't me at all." By the time Johnny discovers, in fact, that that is him, Paine has already led his character and readers on so vividly surreal a tour of the Loser's Las Vegas that the ending seems less a surprise than the only possible conclusion to such an adventure.

But the weirdness and pathos in "Scar Vegas" pales in comparison to what Paine gives us in "General Markman's Last Stand" in which a Marine Corps officer long idolized by his men faces his greatest challenge yet: his retirement party. Suffice it to say there's more to Markman than meets the eye. And in "Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?" the author hits home with an agonizing encounter between a wealthy, shipwrecked American and the boatload of Haitian refugees who rescue him. Each of the 10 stories in this collection is larger than life--not for this writer carefully understated dissections of personal relationships or quiet domestic drama. Instead Paine gives us white slavers, Romanian brothers on a road trip to Reno, Myanmar witch doctors, and delegates to an Anarchist convention. The voices are fresh, the stories unflinchingly true to themselves; Scar Vegas is as compelling as it is edgy. --Sheila Bright

About the Author:

A former marine, newspaper editor, and orderly in a mental hospital, Tom Paine is a graduate of Princeton and the Columbia MFA program. He has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and the Mellon Foundation. He teaches creative writing at Middlebury College and is on the admissions board of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He and his wife live in Charlotte, Vermont.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0151004897
• ISBN 13: 9780151004898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224