Guess and Check - Softcover

Rutkowski, Thaddeus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940724112 ISBN 13: 9781940724119

Verlag: Gival Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Guess and Check is a Giron/Valdez Series for Unique Voices in Literature Book

"A stark, engrossing, Hemingway-esque portrait of a life spent in the margins."
--Kirkus Reviews

" . . . tough and funny and touching and harrowing."
--John Barth

"...Guess and Check is spare, subtle and deadpan, Charles Simic married to Joyce Carol Oates. A beautifully constructed delicate narrative, a near dream of a book, a place 'vulnerable to anyone who wants to break through the glass.'"
--Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl


Guess and Check is not an ordinary memoir; instead, it is a creative look at the life of a biracial boy--later seen as a young man--who adjusts with difficulty to lessons learned from the behavior of his parents and the people around him. In his rural-America world, he is an observer of dysfunction. He doesn't identify with either of his parents--his mother is Asian and his father is Caucasian--or most of the children he meets in school. He observes the addictive pattern of his artist father and the "alien" behavior of his Confucian mother, but he doesn't understand what he sees. At times he is bullied, at other times ignored, so he seeks a way out.

In this series of short stories, we observe his outsider experience which doesn't improve during his college years or his life as a young man. His quirky ideas about sex and relationships hold him back. Romantic situations usually devolve into obsessive-compulsive "acting out." Such insobriety leads him into dark, half-humorous encounters. Later, we see him as an employee for an unnamed company, where he feels anxiety that leads to surreal incidents, bordering between bad dreams and what might actually happen.

Through the experiences of life, he eventually learns to get along with others, even love the people around him, though these feelings don't come easily. As a first-time father, he observes the "alien" behavior of his child; other times, he feels as if he's sleepwalking. Yet through it all, his journey with his own family ends on a positive note.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, including the poetry collections "Tricks of Light" and "Border Crossings." His novel "Haywire" won the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Members' Choice Award, and his creative memoir "Guess and Check" received the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and many other publications.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Gival Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1940724112
• ISBN 13: 9781940724119
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland