No reason on earth: A short story collection - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0937872326 ISBN 13: 9780937872321

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Haake grew up in northern California, and to judge by her new collection she may very well be the West Coast's splendid answer to the glittering stars of New Yorker heaven. Like them Haake deals with alienation, the failure of love, the collapse of the family, and the tragedy of growing older but not wiser. But instead of East Coast pollution, street crime, subway murder, and apartment break-ins, she gives us impending nuclear holocaust and the eruption of Mt. St. Helen's, whose "corrosive ash, finer than silt and stinking of sulphur," smears everything. Haake's work is distinguished by extraordinary insight and seamless prose, as exemplified by "Wait Until Heaven," a stunning portrait of two sisters who misunderstand each other and in the end trade lives, and "Bear and Other Pale Giants," absolutely on the mark in its portrayal of the push-pull of family. This is refreshing, original work. Marcia Tager, Tenafly,
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The world, in this first collection of nine stories, seems an utterly desolate placea place of imposing landscapes and seascapes finely rendered where nothing is connected with anything else. Even the people are isolated, from each other, from themselves. It is the landscape of the spirit in the 1970s, where the anguish of Vietnam goes on forever and the nuclear cloud darkens the scene. In the opening story, "Another Kind of Nostalgia," a man is stoned on drugs, demented, disfigured by acnea catalogue of physical and emotional disabilities. Characters in other tales are confused and reeling, adrift, caught in some perpetual postadolescent crisis that eludes definition. Motives are indiscernible, just as personality, which persistently eludes focus, remains "opaque." A man, for no observable reason, shoots himself, his wife, his infant daughter, two friends. No one thinks to ask why; the fact is simply reported, like the weather. Haake's territory is a chilling, joyless one; in evoking it, she demonstrates that she is an impressively talented writer. (June
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0937872326
• ISBN 13: 9780937872321
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar