The Bostons [Paperback]

Carolyn Cooke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2001

Carolyn Cooke's stories have been featured in several volumes of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Her highly anticipated debut collection tells hilarious and often savage truths about people struggling within the confines of history, society, and class.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With a nod toward Henry James's New England classic, this collection of short stories shuns stuffy, turn-of-the-last-century Bostonians for gruffer characters, offering a dramatic and realistic portrayal of Northeasterners from Cambridge, Mass., to the Maine coast. Cooke has impressive credentials: her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; she has also won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. This debut anthology does not disappoint. Here, she crafts stark, reflective tales motivated more by character development than plot. The nine stories are related (some names pop up more than once), but each tackles a different human flaw, and Cooke handles each installment in a stylistically different way. In "Girl of Their Dreams," for example, she presents a first-person narrative of a 16-year-old girl's experiences moving to a lake house in Maine with her boyfriend. The girl is practically parentless and expecting a baby, yet she doesn't worry or play the role of victim. "Bob Darling," by contrast, omnisciently tells the story of a dying, middle-aged man searching for one last love before the end comes. The collection's title comes from the name residents of a coastal Maine town give to summer vacationers from the big city. Cooke portrays both groups, noting their similarities in roundabout ways. Her characters are fragile but wise, and as resilient as her prose in this spare and provocative compilation. (June)Forecast: Northeastern stores would do well to stock up on this collection, with its regional theme and title. An author tour will take Cooke to Boston and the Maine coast, as well as to San Francisco.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This collection of mannered stories is set amid the deteriorating lives and fortunes of a certain class of East Coast dwellers, a group for whom the visits of the used-furniture buyers are becoming all too frequent. The Bostons are the summer people who come to the Maine coast year after year, holding firm to their sense of pride in where they are from, maintaining their separateness with the dusty aroma of faded class distinction. There is a thread of family and acquaintanceship that connects these people, so that even though all the stories stand on their own, eventually the reader comes to know the relationships and histories of all the characters. What a strange and interesting group these people are, bravely maintaining a bit of style in some cases, holding fast to the shallowness beyond all use or reason in others, but always choosing life, hoping and trying to go forward. The author respects and understands those she writes about but never loses her wry point of view. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618017682
• ISBN-13: 978-0618017683
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,333,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carolyn Cooke's novel, Daughters of the Revolution (Knopf), was named among the Top Ten Books of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and among The New Yorker Magazine's "Reviewers' Favorite" books of the year. Her collection of short stories, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner), was named one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and was a winner of the PEN/Bingham Award for fiction and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway. Her short stories have appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and in two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Nation, Contemporary Literary Criticism and in New California Writing 2011. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, she teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, the poet and essayist Randall Babtkis. See more at http://www.carolyncooke.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sordidly Loveable, December 16, 2001

By 

sarah noack (boston, ma) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bostons (Paperback)

I read The Bostons in one gulp and just entered fully into the stories; it was totally mind blowing. The details are so amazing and vivid, the characters are really colorful and sordidly loveable, and I really love the way the plots interconnect - it was like a really awesome soap opera, and I just kept waiting to see what characters would pop up and to find out what they are doing now... and their lives are just all so full of intrigue, scandal, and clinging to the last remnants of their fallen nobility - it's just really great.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Short Story Collections Out There, July 2, 2009

By 

Mara Stabile "Mara" (Cleveland, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bostons (Paperback)

This woman can bend a sentence like few others.
Rarely have I been so enchanted by a short story collection.
If you love Grace Paley, and love someone with a wry eye for social dislocation, this is your book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very enjoyable, March 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bostons (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book. The stories were unpredictable, the characters tragic and interesting. Each story had a concrete thread that tied it to at least one other story. Some connections between stories were compelling, while others, it seemed to me, were more tangential, sometimes too stretched to claim a serious underpinning. It is very possible I missed some underlying associations that others will appreciate more.