Coronado: Stories [Hardcover]

Dennis Lehane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 8, 2006

From Dennis Lehane, the award-winning author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the Kenzie-Gennaro series, comes a striking collection of five short stories and a play.

A small southern town gives birth to a dangerous man with a broken heart and a high-powered rifle. . . .

A young girl, caught up in an inner-city gang war, crosses the line from victim to avenger. . . . An innocent man is hunted by government agents for an unspecified crime.

. . . A boy and a girl fall in love while ransacking a rich man's house during the waning days of the Vietnam War. . . . A compromised psychiatrist confronts the unstable patient he slept with. . . . A father and a son wage a lethal battle of wits over the whereabouts of a stolen diamond and a missing woman. . . . Along with completely original material, this new col-lection is a compilation of the best of Dennis Lehane's previously published short stories, including "Until Gwen," which was adapted for the stage in 2005 and appears in this book as the play Coronado.

At turns suspenseful, surreal, romantic, and tragically comic, these tales journey headlong into the heart of our national myths—about class, gender, freedom, and regeneration through violence—and reveal that the truth waiting for us there is not what we'd expect.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lehane (Mystic River) hints in the first of these five richly vernacular (and, save one, previously published) stories and one play that "a small town is a hard place to keep a secret." In "Running Out of Dog," two Vietnam vets return to their hometown of Eden, S.C., and become tragically entangled with the wife of a man whose rich family kept him out of the war. Class resentment similarly erupts in "Gone Down to Corpus," set in back-water Texas, 1970, as a group of high school football players breaks into the house of rich kid Lyle, who fumbled the big pass at the last game. They drunkenly wreck the house and are shocked by the appearance of Lyle's younger sister, Lurlene, who is eager to join the party. The collection's centerpiece is "Until Gwen," which has also been adapted by Lehane into a two-act play, Coronado. Transcribed, the play revolves around the edgy reunion of a hustler father and his son, Bobby, newly released after four years in prison. It quickly becomes apparent that Bobby's father has retrieved him only to find out where the heist loot is hidden, and Bobby, in turn, needs to know what happened to his girlfriend, Gwen. Powerfully envisioned lives, recounted unflinchingly. (Sept.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–In this collection of five short stories and a brief play, Lehane assembles a disparate cast, yet each individual takes part in a similar search for something elusive. In ICU, Daniel is hunted down by assailants and must hide in a hospital waiting room to survive. Until Gwen reunites a young man just released from prison with the father who corrupted him. Several of the pieces are set in the South, and their pacing is infused with the slowness of a Southern drawl. The mastery of the author's storytelling lies in his ability to create atmosphere. His characters are defined by the mood of the world around them, a world that is often confining and in which hope is thrown aside in favor of a grim pragmatism. Lehane populates his stories with people who are ordinary and reveals the extraordinary complexity of their lives. The decisions they face are unenviable and their choices somehow unavoidable. The author invents nuanced relationships in which murder and betrayal become acts of loyalty and friendship. Each story introduces a touch of the unlikely or unfortunate into otherwise mundane circumstances, then relays the consequences as events unfold. Haunting imagery lingers long after the book is closed.–Heidi Dolamore, San Mateo County Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1ST edition (August 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006113967X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061139673
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dennis Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He is the author of A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel; Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; and the New York Times bestsellers Mystic River and Shutter Island.

Mystic River was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Coronado, a collection of five stories and a play, was published in the fall of 2006 and includes the story "Until Gwen," which was adapted for the stage.

Lehane's work has been translated into 22 languages. He holds an MFA from Florida International University and is the writer-in-residence at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he runs the Writers in Paradise writers' conference. Before becoming a full-time writer, Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. He lives in the Boston area.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bleakly depressing but very honest..., January 1, 2007

By 

WRG "Webstercat" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coronado: Stories (Hardcover)

I picked this book up because I had heard much of the author Dennis Lehane, and thought it would be worth trying his prose on for size (so to speak). It is, for me, and imperfect fit. Lehane is a talented writer, but there is something unrelentingly dark about this book. Every character seems to be caught in a downward spiral, without any hope of escape. Admittedly, there are a few very quick flashes of biting humor in the stories, but I just had that impatient feeling of wanting the book to be over. Although the characters and situations are different, they are all sinking under the stormy surface of life. His prose is stark and unstructured, in a style that I feel is similar to Raymond Carver, although he explains more than Carver every did. I found the book interesting and the characters were very real, but I guess it's just not he kind of thing I feel I need to experience again.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Noir to the Max, December 24, 2007

By 

Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coronado: Stories (Hardcover)

I'm struck by the response of other Amazon readers. I agree that Coronado is not the equal of one of Lehane's novels, but short stories (and short plays) are seldom the equal of a novel, particularly a novel crafted by a writer as gifted as Lehane. Each of the stories here is dark and each is haunting in its own way. Like any reader, I have my favorite(s), but the collection as a whole carries the Lehane touch. I waited awhile to buy Coronado because, like most readers, I was waiting for the next Lehane novel. Paging through the book it felt odd to me, particularly with a two-act play that grew out of one of the stories. I should have read it earlier. Any 'collection' is, a priori, uneven, but each of the stories held my attention and 'Running out of Dog' and 'Before Gwen' are unforgettable. The stories also take Lehane away from his geographical base and demonstrate the range of his talent. I'm still waiting for that next novel, but Coronado has given me enough of a Lehane fix to help me tolerate the wait.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I was hoping for much better, April 10, 2007

By 

Scott L. Young (Sudbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coronado: Stories (Hardcover)

A few years ago my father turned me onto Lehane with "Gone, Baby, Gone". The incredible insightfulness, the absorbing story lines and the absolutely cutting sarcasm led me to seek out all of his books which I read with frothing eagerness. I was thrilled when "Mysic River" was made into a movie, and Clint and the gang did a great job of it. So after what seems like a long time since "Shutter Island" I was ready for some Lehane, especially since I live (and have been for 20+ years) in the Boston area. I was thus more intrigued by the fact that it was a book of shorts and set in the south, not Boston. I thought "Running Out of Dog" was total brilliant Lehane, crisp, sharp, full of mood and expectation. Then, what happened...? The whole book fell apart. The rest of the stories seemed forced, the dialogue and characters completely non-believable, and frankly the plots were tedious. It was like he spent his creative story telling mastery on "Dog" and wrote the other pieces just to finish a book of short stories on a deadline. Dennis - if you are listening, please, please do another book of shorts, if "Dog" is what you can do, that is where the gold is.