Sixty-four new and selected tales spanning more than twenty years in the career of a modern master of the short story. These sixty-four sharply honed stories, selected by the author from more than twenty years of work, showcase Jim Heynen's equal mastery of terse, elegant prose and old-style country wit and wisdom. Every tale is an unerring slice from the lives of a group of farm boys, each full of mischief and witness to the world's tiny miracles. They make coat sails to carry them down a frozen road, teach a three-legged dog to shake hands, build a house from the junk grown-ups throw away, but they also rescue pigs from an unexpected blizzard, feed apples to a blind pony, and learn the songs of different birds. Along the way, they encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: the goose lady, the girl at school with six toes, the man who kept cigars in his cap, Spitting Sally, their crazy Uncle Jack, and dozens more. Heynen's stories, as uniquely American as those of Mark Twain or Sherwood Anderson, are ribald fun, but, like all good country tales, they are also filled with surprises and unexpected, deeper implications. For this book Heynen has written twenty new stories and revised many of those tales originally published in his first two collections, both now unavailable.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Culled mostly from two out-of-print collections, these 65 anecdotes of farm life are like items that might appear in a down-home column in a weekly newspaper. As the introduction notes, they are difficult to classify and even more difficult to assess. A few offer a touch of recognition of the human condition or of some universal truth, but most, perhaps better suited to oral storytelling, fall flat. Some are quite humorous; others, like "The Albino Fox," in which a beautiful anomaly of nature is destroyed for no reason, are sad. A couple, like "The Old Turtle" and "Ducks and Bacon Rind," are tall tales, or at least facsimiles thereof. Many are not for the squeamish: there is some outhouse humor, and stomach-turning cruelty masquerades as humor in "The Man Who Kept Cigars in his Cap" and "Fewer Cats Now," in which the narrator opines that in the old days, "Fifty cats were not too many on the farm. Sixty or seventy, it was all right. They were worth their weight in cream." The boys dropped them from a windmill with makeshift parachutes and "there were so many cats in those days that nobody missed one if it got killed this way. That was before rat poison." As such quotes demonstrate, the writing can be weak. The farmboys of the title are anonymous mischief makers, and other characters (such as Spitting Sally, the dwarf shoe-repairman or the girl with an extra toe) are never more than fleeting curiosities; the overall effect is like watching a dull parade on a hot day. (Aug.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Jim Heynen
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartfelt and Laugh-Out-Loud Funny,
By A Customer
This review is from: Boys House: New & Selected Stories (Hardcover)
Every now and then some treasure of our national literature slips in under the radar, and it's not until years later that we realize the importance of that writer. Jim Heynen is one of these. Bayard Taylor was everyone's favorite poet in the mid-nineteenth century, while Walt Whitman worked to find himself a publisher. Likewise, Heynen works in the shadows of more popular humorists like Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris, but he has more wisdom and real charm than the two of them combined. He's as close as we have to Mark Twain writing today but with a thoroughly modern sensibility. "The boys," the chief protagonists of his tales, are the anonymous witnesses to the dramatic changes of the twentieth century--but as they happen on a microcosmic level. Heynen talks about class, the loss of the agrarian way of life, the disappearance of country wisdom, and the new privilege accorded a global view over local knowledge--but he does it with the "things" William Carlos Williams demanded of great literature. When one of the boys learns that they have bred kicking out of milk cows, so that no one will be hurt anymore, he says to his grandfather, "That's good, isn't?" To which his grandfather says only, "What do you think?" The point is that each generation's incremental gain also distances them further from their past, and perhaps each easing of the present makes us appreciate less the suffering of our forebears. Heynen knows farm boys and tractors and cows and barns and all the other things that will soon be lost to our children and completely foreign to their children. In a hundred years, these will be our descendants only touchstones to the present we take for granted, a past they will need. Buy this book and read it to your children and grandchildren.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Warm, Understated Delight,
This review is from: Boys House: New & Selected Stories (Hardcover)
I stumbled upon this book basically by accident at the local library and found it a delicious read. Short, prose-poem length stories about life on the farm through the eyes of a group of boys. There is no plot, the boys are not named, and no specific setting, just funny, wise, and relatable events that could happen anywhere in the region. I found myself literally smiling while reading this book, and I finished it in utter delight. The tales are first-rate; the author brings life to ordinary moments (and exciting moments too) in a way that will inspire reader to write a book of his own. Heynen has studied writing for a lot of his life. This shows. The writing is excellent. This is fine, fine literature folks, and an easy read to boot.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
