Set in family homes, factories, shops, small-town streets, backyards-the familiar landscapes of our everyday lives-these stories take us by surprise as they plumb the complex and often tenuous connections that exist between child and parent, husband and wife, friend and friend, the individual and his own thoughts:
- The unwitting jinx at a garbage collection company-accidents happen around him, not to him-avoids becoming the company pariah when he's shown a way to make his "powers" work to everyone's advantage...
- A man taught by his father's example to disdain work, and who married into a family obsessed with it (his sever brothers-in-law, carpenters, built his house while he passed out the beers), may have found his calling at last-in sophisticated self-amusement...
- On a picket line-across months of long, cold nights-a man and a woman are drawn together by a shared desperate optimism and by the scent of the woman's perfume...
- The game of Risk played habitually-obsessively-by a group of friends becomes a strangely unsettling reflection of their own tangled lives...
- Facing a middle age and a growing sense of emptiness, a man convinces himself that his dead friend-whose life he always envied, whose approval would validate his own life-has never died...
- When his teacher, and then his parents, dub him a "goof," a young boy hesitantly unveils graphic proof that he's already mastered his father's dream of being an artist...
In each of the ten stories, Charles Dickinson puts a spin on the ordinary. It is the pleasure of these stories that they enable us to see what would perhaps otherwise remain hidden: humor in the most mundane situation, eloquence in a simple human gesture, the quirky, telling, sometimes ennobling moments in the day-to-dayness of life.
About the Author :
With seven highly acclaimed books to his credit, Charles Dickinson takes American fiction back to the complexity of modern life and love with his characteristically incisive irony and humor. Critics have compared him to such masters as Margaret Atwood, Ann Tyler, Michael Crichton and Raymond Carver.
His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and The Atlantic, among others, and two stories, "Risk" and "Child in the Leaves," were included in O. Henry collections. He has received generous praise for his novels, Waltz in Marathon, Crows, The Widows' Adventures, Rumor Has It, A Shortcut in Time, and its sequel, A Family in Time, and his collection of stories, With or Without.
Born in Detroit, Dickinson lives near Chicago with his wife.
Review :
"[Dickinson] reaffirms his stature as an original writer with a talent for creating offbeat characters of uncommon depth and appeal . . . his subtle commentary on the human condition always rings true." - Publishers Weekly
"Marvelous . . . an artist able to work magic." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Dickinson has a canny eye. . . . He can surprise us at almost every turn. This is the kind of collection that you'll read all the way through as soon as you find the time. Buying it will be like buying yourself a box of chocolates in which every piece is a coveted nut." - Chicago Tribune
"[Dickinson] can surprise us at almost every turn. This is the kind of collection that you'll read all the way through as soon as you find the time. Buying it will be like buying yourself a box of chocolates in which every piece is a coveted nut." - Chicago Tribune
"Dickinson makes the reader feel happily enmeshed in his characters' lives. . . . His orchestration of detail is so meticulous, his ability to surprise so consistent, that he never wanders into cliché. We come away from this collection sobered but enlightened . . . forced to look again, to discover at some deeper level what we thought we had already known." - New York Times
"[Dickinson's] orchestration of detail is so meticulous, his ability to surprise so consistent, that he never wanders into cliché. We come away from this collection sobered but enlightened . . . forced to look again, to discover at some deeper level what we thought we had already known." - New York Times
"Additional proof of [Dickinson's] sharp craftsmanship and penchant for original, offbeat plots." - Baltimore Sun
"A smart, knowing, perceptive book . . . as pertinent as it is wry. Dickinson finds honor and dignity in the small struggle, and it is this that gives his stories their own honor and dignity." - Washington Post
"Extraordinary. . . . Compelling. . . . A first-class short story writer. . . . He writes compassionately and captures with heartbreaking clarity the moments when we are most vulnerable and deserving of grace." - Chicago Sun-Times
"Absolutely superb." - Boston Globe
