Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason - Softcover

Mason, Bobbie Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880016574 ISBN 13: 9780880016575

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

A disabled trucker builds his dream house from Lincoln Logs. A recent divorcee fantasizes about time travel as she lies in a tanning booth and wishes for a future "unbounded by time and space or custody arrangements." These are a few of the people who inhabit the world of Midnigt Magic, a collection of Bobbie Ann Mason's best short fiction, featuring "Shiloh."

In her signature style, Mason moves quietly through the lives of her Kentucky characters, capturing their tangeld aspirations and buried disappointments. Men and women struggle with the ironies of modern life in a traditional rural society, trying to cope with fractured families, television evangelism, women's lib, and MTV.

With an introduction by the author especially written for this new volume, this timeless collection chronicles the perplexed lives of contemporary people as they confront our everchanging society. As one character wryly puts it, "Nobody knows anything. The answers are always changing."

About this title

Review:

Readers of Bobbie Ann Mason looking for something new won't find it in Midnight Magic; this collection of 17 stories culled from two previous collections, Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life, is more likely to satisfy fans who can be content with a compendium of greatest hits. Since her debut in the early '80s, Mason has been part of a group of writers from the new South--authors who, though they share the same geography with old masters like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, bring an entirely different perspective to it. Gone are the pages-long parenthetical paragraphs of Faulkner; gone are O'Connor's acute renderings of Southern psychology. Mason's characters wouldn't recognize psychology if it rose up and bit them on the keister. This is a world of shopping malls, daytime TV, and unsteady employment, an ethos in which not-so-genteel poverty extends to the imagination as well as the bank account. Brand names and the titles of television shows serve as mile-markers in these stories, and Mason's (often) unemployed heroes and big-haired heroines are only vaguely aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason draws these portraits of real life with precision; her accretion of details work hard to bring the reader so deeply into the picture that you can see the crumbs of Wonderbread on the Formica countertops and smell the stale Old Milwaukee on the Sunday morning after Saturday night. Yet as precise and colorful as Mason's images are, in the end they are much like photographs--remarkable in the clarity of what they show, yet only hinting at what goes on in the hearts and minds inside the characters they portray.

About the Author:

Bobbie Ann Mason has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her books include In Country and Feather Crowns. She lives in her native Kentucky.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0880016574
• ISBN 13: 9780880016575
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316