Steven Polansky's universe has no heroes, no villains. His people are fallen and eminently human. They try to live difficult lives with dignity and grace, to cope with what scares them. These are powerful stories of brokenness - broken families, failed loves, dangerous intimacies, unrealized dreams - that are surprisingly tender and often comic. These are stories that are at once bright and dark, written with scrupulous moral precision.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
With the surgical skill of his literary forebear Raymond Carver, Polansky cuts away the skin of conventional relationships and love as it's normally described to reveal in nine smart (and smarting) stories the cankers that infect us all. The ineffectual and frustrated father of "Leg" refuses to treat the scrape he gets from a pointless slide into third in a church group baseball game. He turns feverish and stiff, afflicted to the bone, but won't see the doctor until his disdainful and uncommunicative teenage son comes to him in tears. Punning with a gentle smirk, the story "Sleights" tells of a dead magician who, omniscient, watches as his daughter Judith absents herself from his funeral. Aware but unrepenting of some crime he committed against herAone suspects neglect at bestAthe magician does not defend himself when Judith claims in a letter to her estranged cousin that she hates her father and is not sorry he has died. In "Coda," Lack and Rosenthal, acquaintances, not friends, come into an uneasy and quickly dissolved intimacy when Rosenthal tells Lack the story of his sexual depravity. Polansky's dialogue is clipped, the stories brief. Suspenseful and riddled characters, both distressed and repressed, dwell in these neat plots pulled together with nooselike finality. Here, the last laugh belongs to Polansky and it's a devastating, ironic twitch of a smile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8142-5019-X Polanskys debut volumeof skillful, and skillfully familiar, storiesis winner of Ohios Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction. Leading off is Leg, which, though included in The Best American Short Stories 1995, may merely anger some in its telling of a religious family man who lets his injured leg go untreated until it needs amputation, all seemingly in orderby nursing this Christ- like scourgeto gain the respect of his sullen teenaged son. Other family dysfunctions occur in Sleight, with its pun on sleight/slight, a near-hyper-researched story about a magician whose daughter estranges him; and in the also ambiguously titled Rein, in which a man feels both trapped and made guilty by his wifes clinical depression, a situation thats little assuaged by a visit from the dashing, handsome horse-breeder who was once her lover, now enviably free. Less ambitiously symbol-structured pieces occur in Acts, another father-son tale, this time about athletics and courage; and in the title story, told by a Manhattan cabby who brieflyand with only purest intentionsstalks Miss Thailand around town. Caution is given in Beard that stories should never be written about writing stories, though breaking that rulea 40-year- old man is winner of a fiction contestresults in Polanskys best and richest piece here, especially in its portrayal of the nationally known writer who comes to offer a master class to the winners. Less good overall is Pantalone, about a Prufrock- like English prof, his own marriage on the rocks, who falls in love with a beautiful student who has a scarred face; his passive inertia (he loses both wife and girl) may be central to the storys theme, but it gives no pleasure to the reader, as neither does his scarcely believable insensitivity. Conscientiously wrought fiction, always capable in scheme and technique, less often strongly involving. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
engaging and perplexing, just like a lot of people I meet!,
By A Customer
This review is from: DATING MISS UNIVERSE: NINE STORIES (SANDSTONE PRICE SHORT FICTION) (Paperback)
A former student of Steve's, I was excited to read his collection of work. The characters who populate his novels are delusional, rife with feeling, and altogether "normal." This is, perhaps, a strange description, but Polansky's depiction of human nature engages and perplexes. It's like getting a glimpse into the heart and mind of that neighbor you haven't yet "figured out." After reading the stories, you may still not know what exactly makes your neighbor tick; Polansky tells the stories from the limited perspectives of his characters, but in the end, you arrive at some understanding of the "craziness"-the foibles, misperceptions, and obsessions--which drive both your neighbor and yourself.
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