Whites - Softcover

Rush, Norman

3.8

485 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394544714 ISBN 13: 9780394544717

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986

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Six stories deal with a student anthropologist in South Africa, vacationing couples, a young thief, a seductive conversation, a South African and his American wife, and a lonely widower

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About the Author:

Norman Rush was born and raised in the San Francisco area, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer, a college instructor, and, with his wife Elsa, lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983. His stories gave appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and The Best American Short Stories of 1971, 1984 and 1985. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. His first novel, Mating, won the National Book Award for fiction and the prestigious Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize.

From Library Journal:

Eisenberg, author of a comic play, Pastorale , presents a first collection of seven short stories, four of which appeared in the New Yorker. Her stories, urbane, witty, sophisticated, are about articulate people trapped in the complexities of modern life. They are about women seeking commitment who fastened on the wrong man. In the title story a young woman literally drops her life whenever Ivan calls; she visits him in Montreal where she finally understands he will never be tied to her in any real way. The stories are saved from cliche by Eisenberg's insight, her detachment, and her humor. Six serious stories in Norman Rush's Whites are set in a black republic in Africa. They reveal the deep cultural chasm between whites and blacks which ultimately leads to disaster. Rush also deals with the alienation of the whites who have come to Africa. They have come to offer technological improvement and must face their own inadequacy, the hypocrisy of white religion, the complacency of technocrats. They are forced to acknowledge the difficulty inherent in any attempt to bridge the gap between a sensuous, more primitive way of life and industrial society. Both these collections, though dissimilar in subject and tone, are revealing of the societies they portray and are strongly recommended for general short story collections. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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