Pushed to Shore: A Short Novel - Softcover

Gadbow, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330817 ISBN 13: 9781889330815

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2003

Synopsis

Winner of the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

"This novel’s poignancy, I think, comes from the paradoxical confrontation between innocence and experience these Asian strivers are caught in—at the same time that they are rendered childlike by ignorance of their new culture, we know they have been singed and seared, and therefore secretly toughened. Immigration is such a significant phenomenon right now that this tension between competency and confusion, maturity and infantilization is an enormously fecund subject for a novelist with a well-developed sense of irony."—From the Foreword by Rosellen Brown

In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of 12, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this resonant first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the world they fled and the one they are currently negotiating in Missoula, Montana. Gadbow meshes the lives of these refugees with that of the book’s narrator Janet Hunter, a teacher struggling to manage contemporary life, with a failed marriage and a string of disappointments haunting her own past.

In a deceptively simple prose style that reads like easy conversation, and with an admirable lack of sentimentality, Kate Gadbow has written a remarkable novel depicting the clash of cultures and the difficult realities inherent to a world given only to constant change, where the harbor of a kind shore seems frustratingly out of reach.

Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she lives with her husband, journalist Daryl Gadbow.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Pushed to Shore is the fifty-third title to be published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Founded in 1994 to publish poetry and short fiction, Sarabande's mission is to disburse these works with diligence and integrity, and to serve as an educational resource to teachers and students of creative writing. Since the 1996 debut of the press, our titles have received positive review attention from nationally distinguished media including The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, Small Press, The Nation, and Library Journal.

About the Author:

Kate Gadbow directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana in Missoula.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1889330817
• ISBN 13: 9781889330815
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290