A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella - Hardcover

Gates, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385351534 ISBN 13: 9780385351539

Verlag: KNOPF, 2015

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Críticas:

Gates offers all the pleasures to be found in Edward St. Aubyn, and more, because where the English writer is formal and elegant, Gates brings a loping, loose-limbed, colloquial American rhythm to his fiction. . . I doubt there is a better writer of conversational dialogue at work in America. James Wood, The New Yorker
Brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories. Ben Marcus, The New Yorker
Knowing and frank stories. . . a smart book about smart, articulate people who get in their own way again and again [with] not a lazy phrase on view. Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book Review

This is David Gates at his best. . . . It s a book of fiction about people you ll never believe aren t real. Dana Varinsky, Time Out New York

This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever. Sara Nelson, Amazon
Gates is a master of variation [and] how good this book is, how craftily conversational the prose is, how often seemingly tossed-off lines produce that coveted spine tingle. Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
He s really, really funny about failure. Nobody writes about failure better than David Gates. Lorin Stein, NPR
David Gatesis a wonderful writer. The stories in A Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully realized, entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise, outrageousand funny all at the same time. Geoff Dyer
This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever. Sara Nelson, Amazon
Remarkable. . . Gates turns a clear yet compassionate eye on a motley crew of characters who cheat, drink, snort, and lie their way through the autumn of their lives [and] the result is a moving account of flawed existence. The New Yorker
Stories with crystalline urgency. . .Gates is one of the writers keeping the classic American short story alive [and he] gets his people right, both men and women. . . . His first collection in fifteen years carries the weight of maturity; of being more acquainted with the impulses and compromises one makes over the course of a lifetime. Jana Martin, Chronogram

The collection is really good [but] I m surprised more isn t made of his comic talents. There s a caustic wit at work on nearly every page; empathy and misanthropy match stride for stride in a way that recalls Cheever at his best. In Banishment a previously unpublished novella about a spectacularly bad marriage it sometimes seems there s an act of casual betrayal on every page, each designed to puncture another set of social mores. Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review
Gates [has] staked out a territory, the anxieties of a particular corner of the middle class: artsy, at one time hip or (even slightly) radical, aspirational [in] creativity or spirit. That these aspirations have crumbled is part of the point, as his characters reckon with the compromises, physical and emotional, that living brings [as well as] the tension between the profane and the sacred, between the height of our ambitions and the depths of our desires. . . .These [stories] capture a floating insubstantiality we can t help but recognize because it also belongs to us. David L. Uhlin, The Los Angeles Times
Malice and goodness duke it out in the dark hearts of David Gates's characters. . . . [He] isn't one to pass judgments. He just sends devastatingly original dispatches from the heart of darkness. . . . It broadens the spectrum of truthfulness and emotion for which he is known [and] captures both the unfettered love and flashes of rage. Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Deliciously wicked... The naughty musings most of us choose to ignore compel Gates s characters to act. . . . These people mock their demons and, when called to account, exhibit such complexity, humor and intelligence that you'll savor every page. Kristy Davis, More magazine
Where has David Gates been all of my life? How is it that I ve missed a writer who transforms all our failures and foibles into tales so gripping they read like great mystery novels?A Hand Reached Down To Guide Meis as unflinching as fiction gets, one of those books that feels like a discovery from the first page to the last. Adam Ross
Acclaim from the U.K.
The irreverent and confident prose of this American writer is bewitching Gates s landscapes are deliciously detailed - you can feel the sofa fabric, read the newspapers, smell the bourbon - but his tours de force are his sublime characters You will fall in love with (or hate) every damn sexy, well-read, disillusioned one of them. Daily Mail
Whether you read the nicely poised conclusion of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me as defeated or optimistic, the narrator speaks with the authentic voice of hard-won experience: "I can still sing," he notes. "Having some age on me, maybe I sound more like the real thing." This could be Gates' own 68-year-old hand reaching down. For he is the real thing, as is illustrated on every page of this sad, hilarious and unflinchingly brilliant book. The Independent

It is an absolute delight to be back in his masterful hands. Reading David Gates is far from an uncomplicated experience; his writing is dark, bitter, hilarious, truthful and complex, full of emotional turmoil and damaged characters, deeply flawed people doing pretty unspeakable things to themselves and others, and yet the self-aware flickers of humour, the knowing nods to the frailty of human existence, make him utterly compulsive On the evidence of the new book, Gates remains a formidable and important writer for our times. And Jernigan retains its crazed power as a novel. Read them both. Independent on Sunday
Gates s 1991 novel, Jernigan charted its eponymous anti-hero s descent into alcoholism in a perfect balancing act of horror and hilarity. Like that memorable debut, all 12 stories in A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me are set in the north-eastern US, where references to the Puritan past form an ironic contrast to the insatiable appetites of the present. Whatever lane Gates lures his characters down, you can be sure it will lead through the Valley of Humiliation although the prospect of perdition at the end is, just occasionally, tempered with surprising glimmers of redemption. Financial Times

Gates is a technically excellent writer who can brilliantly illuminate the insides of his characters heads. There s a truthfulness to this book that is both the best and most depressing thing about it. Glasgow Herald

Gates is a truly formidable talent, but you d be wary of having him over to dinner: you d wonder what he was thinking. Sunday Times

While David Gates style is different, the tone edgier, he shares Richard Ford s understanding of the self-desctructive aspects of human nature Gates strengths are sharp, witty dialogue, sexual tension and subtlety. Also, a non-judgmental tone, even when his characters do something devastatingly cruel In each story, we witness humanity in their weakest, most shameful moments: I went back to working...until God, must we? Until I was able to sell my father s house (A Hand Reached Down). I suspect it is this shall we call it courage? that attracts readers. Irish Examiner

Gates brilliance is all the more surprising given the seemingly restricted nature of his milieu Gates unearths hard-won truths and makes sure they re funny, too. Metro

Ferociously talented this new collection of stories is a testament to his singular genius. Catholic Herald"

Reseña del editor:

These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whomNew York magazine anointed “a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.”

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young or old or neither, who are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living—or assisted-dying—facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. Terrifyingly self-aware, they refuse to go gently—even when they’re going nowhere fast, in settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast to the countryside of upstate New York and New England.

Relentlessly inventive, alternately hilarious and tragic, always moving, this book proves yet again that Gates is one of our most talented, witty and emotionally intelligent writers.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: KNOPF
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0385351534
• ISBN 13: 9780385351539
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336