Detecting Metal [Paperback]

Fred Bonnie (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Each of these dozen stories is dedicated to an acknowledged master of American fiction, usually one best known for his or her short stories. Indeed, a particular story often seems to echo its dedicatee. The title story, dedicated to O. Henry, has a surprise at its ending. "On the Postcard Road" tells of a cross-country drive, as might be expected of a story "for Jack Kerouac," though the macabre circumstances of this trip seem like something perhaps out of Flannery O'Connor, the dedicatee of "Those Are the Terms," which, appropriately enough, is about sex and religion. "The Friends of the Trees" is "for Robert Penn Warren" and echoes his famous novel All the King's Men by being a political story, albeit one wackier and far smaller time than Willie Stark's career. What distinguishes those stories and the other six, too, is their magnetic readability, a result of Bonnie's skill at quickly limning utterly lifelike characterizations, incidents, and dialogue. These are fundamentally comic and optimistic stories, handled so surely that they can lunge toward sentimentality, as "Detecting Metal" does most daringly, and yet achieve emotional truth because everything in them rings so true. Bonnie is a peer of his dedicatees: read him. Ray Olson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Fred Bonnie is a relocated Maine author, who's been living in the South for 25 years. His stories reflect the tension of that, among other things.

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Livingston Pr; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942979532
• ISBN-13: 978-0942979534
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,555,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars metal detecting, April 15, 2008

By 

Mary A. Bronnimann - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Detecting Metal (Paperback)

This product was ordered for my son who loves metal detecting...he was thrilled when he could get help with his passion! Quick ship, arrived is great shape he said.Thanks

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unacknowledged master of the short story, August 22, 2006

By 

Brandon Mann (Jacksonville, Alabama) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Detecting Metal (Paperback)

Fred Bonnie riffs on the writers who have influenced him. Each story is dedicated to a different author, everybody from O. Henry to Harry Crews, from Sarah Orne Jewett to Bernard Malamud, from Truman Capote to Jack Kerouac -- and none of the dedicatees is dishonored by the comparison. In these varied and thoughtful stories you'll meet such characters as a thirteen-year-old who "was once father to forty babies," a Crimson Tide Christian girl with an unusual litmus test for lovers, a drunken bank janitor brandishing a "magnificent two-hand, six-foot-long German sword from the fifteenth century," a man driving his dead brother from Alabama to Maine, and three liquored-up good ol' boys whose job is cleaning snake cages at the zoo. This is a good, solid collection of short stories by an unacknowledged master of the form, short stories that feature humor, heartbreak, and wisdom in equal parts. "Next to reading, drinking, and watching TV all at once, the surest sign of maturity is wisdom."