Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories [Hardcover]

Rick DeMarinis (Author), James Welch (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

Borrowed Hearts traces the development of Rick DeMarinis's incantatory voice, including newer work as well as stories selected from his three previous, highly acclaimed collections: Under Wheat (1986), the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction; The Coming of the Free World, a New York Times Notable Book (1988); and The Voice of America (1991). The title story was included in 1991's The Best Stories of the South, and "Your Story" was played on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Traveling salesmen, small-time hustlers, hitchhikers, harried fathers, and sex-obsessed sons: Rick DeMarinis's stories take men at the end of their rope, then give them just enough line for things to get interesting. Robert Bly-style rhetoric drives a burned-out high school teacher to violence in "Wilderness"; answering a Help Wanted ad leads to disastrous results in "Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs." In charting the downward arc of their character's lives, DeMarinis's smart, self-conscious tales run the gamut from experimental fables to down-to-earth realism. In "Insulation," for example, his protagonist has a genetic predisposition for being struck by lightning; the gently naturalistic "Voice of America," on the other hand, follows a 17-year-old boy who both loves and resents his promiscuous mother and dreams "of waking up as someone else, in a different place, where things were decent."

Even those stories that begin as mere narrative exercises soon turn into things greater than the sum of their parts. "Romance: A Prose Villanelle," for example, crosses the preposterous conventions of a romance novel with the strict patterning of the villanelle (the famously difficult poetic form in which two lines are repeated at intervals throughout; think "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). The results are odd, hilarious, and curiously apt: "Silence slips into the bloated prose," one repeated passage tells us. "It invades each trumped-up scene.... It is there, smirking, when you begin, there in the middle, showing a wider grin, and it waits for you at the dead end--a surprise ending of dead paper, rustling with the last word." It's difficult for fiction to interrogate itself and engage the reader's sympathies, but DeMarinis pulls it off. In Borrowed Hearts, he shows himself one of the funniest and deadliest American writers at work today: a Flannery O'Connor for the Prozac age. --Magda Burns

From Publishers Weekly

"The Boys We Were, The Men We Became," the title of one of the 11 new stories in this compilation, also serves as shorthand for the themes that DeMarinis (The Year of the Zinc Penny) explores here. Taken together, the 21 intricately layered short narratives from previous collections and the new entries under the title "Borrowed Hearts" produce a poignant, dark yet often humorous portrait of American boyhood in the shadow of WWII, and American manhood in the gloom of confused values. Bludgeoned by misinformation from lost but overbearing adults, his boys find solace in the mechanics of ham radios and propeller planes. They become men confounded by hypocrisy, adultery and a tendency toward entropy. In "Fault Lines," AlfredoAstunned by his wife's indifference and the relentless chatter of his hyperactive young son, fearful of the directions his cholesterol and testosterone numbers are taking-- tells a colleague he's a peaceful man. "That's the world's number one oxymoron" is the reply. Leon in the title story is in his mid-60s when he develops an ability to smell the past and all the nostalgia it evokes; the cause is pathology, an aneurysm that has to be removed. Bernard, in "The Boys We Were..." can't understand how his father returned from the war both fat and empty. Most of his characters are sympathetic; however, DeMarinis also produces a number of grotesques: missile-silo watchmen, door-to-door salesmen, the couple who abandon their children. DeMarinis's true territory is the isolation of men who yearn for a home that doesn't exist, boys who learned to be James Dean, Aldo Ray, Marlon Brando, then grew up to discover there was no market for that facility, and became men with spiritual indigestion. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888363983
• ISBN-13: 978-1888363982
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,882,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inventive and funny, May 10, 1999

By 

J. Robert Lennon ([e-mail]) (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories (Hardcover)

I'd like to throw in my two cents about Rick DeMarinis: he's a wonderful writer, has been a great influence on me, and many of his best books, sadly, have gone out of print. I highly recommend seeking out the collections many of these stories come from, and the terrific novels "Year of the Zinc Penny" and "The Burning Women of Far Cry." The new stories in here are as mordantly funny as his old stuff.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A showcase anthology, February 8, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Borrowed Hearts (Paperback)

Borrowed Hearts: New And Selected Stories showcases the work of Rick DeMarinis, a major, award-winning American literary talent, and the author of six novels and three previous collections of short fiction. Borrowed Hearts is a showcase anthology that includes twenty-one selections from his three previous collections and eleven new stories never before published. Borrowed Hearts is "must" reading for all DeMarinis fans, and will serve as an ideal introduction for those becoming acquainted with his literary skills and story telling expertise for the first time.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good stories, bad typos, January 2, 2001

By 

Richard LeComte "richlec" (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Borrowed Hearts (Paperback)

The range of Rick Demarinis' fiction here is remarkable. It stretches from World War II to the present. He generally tackles sick families from the viewpoints of misguided or neglected children, adults reviewing their lives or accidental witnesses. His paintbrush ranges across the country but seems to focus on the Southwest and California. Not all the stories here are winners, and the outlook in most of these tales is pretty bleak. The publication is marred by embarrassing typos.