In the Land of Men: Stories - Softcover

Nelson, Antonya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684846861 ISBN 13: 9780684846866

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

In this powerful collection of stories, Antonya Nelson portrays women whose lives have slipped loose from their moorings and the men who can't really anchor them. Here we meet Roxanne, the tomboy who consistently chooses men who are not her equal; the loving Marta, whose husband keeps a separate house where he retreats when married life overwhelms him; and Bebe, a married mother of two teenagers who leaves it all behind when her lover comes on a motorcycle to claim her. With painfully keen perception, Nelson creates stories that linger in the mind long after they are read, and which create a unique view of relations between the sexes in the small towns and big cities of America.

About this title

About the Author:

Antonya Nelson teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and is the award-winning author of three novels and four short story collections. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Best American Short Stories. She divides her time among Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Nelson's first story collection, The Expendables, won the 1990 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her second is even better--tough-talking, provocative tales that plunge deep into the heart of love and solitude. Male or female, regardless of age, Nelson's protagonists are a standoffish, unblinking bunch. In her arresting title story, a Chicago waitress--whose three teenaged brothers have captured her rapist and insist on a confrontation--stares out at the snow and reflects on the misnomer of justice in an unjust world; in ``The Happy Day,'' the unhappy assistant to a wedding photographer compulsively shoots images of blinking brides, weeping flower- girls, and puking best men to paste up on her walk-up apartment walls; in ``Fire Season,'' a petty thief stands at the bedroom door of a rich, teenaged one-night stand and wonders why he's unable to rob her; and in ``Goodbye, Midwest,'' the grown daughter of intellectual snobs guiltily ignores the wedding announcements that regularly arrive from her childhood best friend. Divided between urban, middle-class settings and the isolated adobe dwellings of the Southwest, Nelson's stories share an aridity of vision and terseness of language that refresh and clarify in spite of some depressing themes and inexplicably abrupt conclusions. Her isolated, uncompromising men and women, hungering for human contact yet feeling powerless to change, still take private satisfaction in the slight, everyday revelations of the soul, and find a separate peace more durable than romantic happy endings. Sharp-edged American fiction, by a very promising writer. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684846861
• ISBN 13: 9780684846866
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240