Charm and setting reminiscent of early-90s Seattle.... The fourteen stories in this powerful new collection create a vivid, often startling portrait of contemporary Seattle. Set throughout the city's varied and colorful neighborhoods, the stories focus on the residents of a downtown apartment building: from an aging tenant organizer to a breeder of butterflies, and emigre artist to a deluded newspaper pressman, an alcoholic Mormon woman to a disillusioned college professor, a lonely secretary to a lovelorn delivery boy, a pair of roommate junkies to a gang of skinheads, an evicted Indian maskmaker to an octogenarian husband and wife. These prize-winning stories depict working and out-of-work people in conflict with themselves and their urban surroundings--struggling to preserve their dignity and, with any luck, pay the rent.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
A wonderful, illuminating portrait . . . of Seattle. -- Brian Evenson
The stories are characterized by ambition, complexity, profundity, and craft. -- Gordon Weaver
The stories are characterized by ambition, complexity, profundity, and craft. -- Gordon Weaver
About the Author
Peter Donahue currently teaches creative writing and journalism at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama.
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More About the Author
Peter Donahue is the author of the new novel Clara and Merritt (Wordcraft of Oegon 2010). He is also the author of the novel Madison House (Hawthorne Books 2005), winner of the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and the short story collection The Cornelius Arms (Missing Spoke Press 2000). He is co-editor, with John Trombold, of the anthologies Reading Seattle: The City in Prose (2004) and Reading Portland: The City in Prose (2007), both published by the University of Washington Press, and his Retrospective Review column on vintage Northwest literature appears in each issue of Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, published by the Washington State Historical Society. His short stories and critical articles on American literature have appeared in numerous literary journals and scholarly periodicals. Peter received a B.A. from the University of Washington, M.A. from Virginia Tech, and Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University. He is an associate professor of English at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, where he teaches creative writing and journalism.
Peter Donahue Homepage: http://faculty.bsc.edu/pdonahue/index.htm
Peter Donahue Homepage: http://faculty.bsc.edu/pdonahue/index.htm
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
refreshing and purposeful,
By "ericgreen" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Cornelius Arms (Paperback)
Versatile and empathic, Donahue shows a languid and swift compassion for the derelect and motlied inhabitants of a downtown Seattle apartment building. It is refreshing to read of Seattle in it's pre-grunge boom days where the forgotten and blighted areas maintained a unique blend of life without all the coffee metaphors. I was touched by the diversity of characters that Donahue so simply assumes; he does so without pomposity or anxiety.The book finely depicts the spaces of an urban icon without too much glory, too much nostalgia, or too much kitsch. As America's cities become appropriated by its homogeneous suburbs, I sense the purpose to read of urban tales so diversely compelling.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing,
By
This review is from: The Cornelius Arms (Paperback)
Donahue's book and its themes have promise, but this has all been done before, such as in William T. Volmann's work on San Francisco or Palahniuk's on Portland--and those writers are engaging without seeming superior to their subjects, while Donahue's writing is often dry and tepid, and rarely infused with either the energy or the involvement his subject requires.
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