A Place of Light: Stories - Hardcover

Bush, Mary Bucci

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688062555 ISBN 13: 9780688062552

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1990

Synopsis

A collection of stories depicts working-class people in a rural community, dealing with the pain of everyday living

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In each of the 12 delicately limned stories in this powerful debut collection, Bush (1987 winner of the PEN/Nelson Algren award for best unfinished collection of short stories) captures the grim essence of her characters' struggles for survival in a relentlessly bleak and cruel world. The influence of Raymond Carver, Bush's mentor, is obvious, but she has stepped well clear of his shadow. Her narrators are often young girls whose deadpan revelations of abuse and deprivation are rendered in clear, cool prose. Most of the stories have rural settings and are about working-class people. In the title story, a broken-down car heralds the end of a bad relationship between a man and a woman; the narrator is one of her two children. In "Rude Awakening," a girl who dreads First Communion hopes that the bomb will drop, the family would "scramble for the fallout shelter. And then she wouldn't have to wear the radioactive dress." Bush's characters are alienated, but at the same time they yearn for connections. Each story reiterates this conflict; read together, these tales reveal the sure voice of a new writer with things to say.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

These are stories of disillusionment and survival, stories showing the resilience of children estranged from their elders and the way people cope with the burdens and lessons of life. In "Cure," "Outlaws," and "Bread," the eye of childhood focused on adults is discerning, penetrating, fearless. In "A Place of Light," the unforgettable Hyacinth, "black and strong and mysterious," helps a mother and her children find the courage to leave an abusive stepfather. Similarly, the children of the even darker world of "Underground Railroad" escape abusive parents in a powerful, liberating conclusion. Bush's work depicts the ordinary folk of her native rural upstate New York with the immediacy and realism of Raymond Carver (one of her teachers). Like the astonished narrator in the epiphany of "Glass," she takes "all the mysteries and inventions of the everyday world" and makes them indelibly her own.
- Mary Soete, San Diego P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0688062555
• ISBN 13: 9780688062552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254