In these nine brilliant stories, love and marriage are examined and reexamined from a variety of perspectives, all provocative, all troubling. A teacher falls in love with her student, a sister dances naked for her brother, a wife loves her husbandÂ’s mistress, a widow learns the close relationship between love and death, a trilogy explores the course of a marriage shot through with secrets, and the irrationality and mystery of love are discovered over and over again. The dream house of the title story is the one beneath the surface, the private house, where love opens up new avenues of intimacy, news ways of knowing another person. In Barbara BeanÂ’s debut collection, we are introduced to a striking new voice in contemporary fiction, a voice at once sexy, funny, wise-and unforgettable.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
"In the title story of Barbara BeanÂ’s quiet and lucid first collection of short fiction, we meet a woman named Julia whose husband has spent his inheritance building his dream house; once it is completed, he flees it and her. The experience confirms something Julia has always known: Â’Â’You canÂ’t build a dream house. A dream house is only a dream. It can never be real.Â’Â’ That understanding permeates each of these nine stories -- stories in which characters like Mary Mahoney, the young high school teacher in 'Honey,' drift between daily life and dreamy longing. Mary struggles to control her classroom and her feelings for one of her male students. In the midst of this Freudian stew, Bean pointedly distinguishes between who Mary is and who she thinks she is. Both views are crystallized by detailed observation: 'Her actual apartment, unlike the quiet severity of the one she imagined for herself, was above a florist on the town square and next to a garage; she could hear air hissing, bells ringing.' Curtis and Paula, a married couple with a young son, appear in two stories. 'Curtis had noticed a need for more light lately,' begins the first of them. ItÂ’s a graceful indication of his search for physical and spiritual illumination. Yet such light will eventually expose the intensity of his loneliness, the urgency of his emotional needs. Although no one in these stories moves much beyond his or her pain or problems, Bean deftly peels back the layers of grief and indifference that conceal an inner life. As she articulates her charactersÂ’ desires, she demonstrates in the best of these stories that hope is the energy, the spark, behind even the most common occurrences." --Judith Bolton-Fasman, The New York Times
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
utter amazement,
By Natasha A Jaroscak (Greencastle, Indiana United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dream House: Stories (Series in Contemporary Fiction) (Hardcover)
Barbara Bean is one of the best short story writers I have read in a long time. I don't fancy myself a fan of short stories, but she has changed my mind. The details and storylines are absolutly amazing and I love her ideas. She is a huge assest to the writing world and needs to be featured on the ... show! Wow! what a triumph!
5.0 out of 5 stars
BEAUTIFUL,
By
This review is from: Dream House: Stories (Series in Contemporary Fiction) (Hardcover)
This collection is beautiful beyond belief. I have given this book as a gift three times, and each person has said it was one of the best books they had read in (I kid you not) years. Between five and twenty years, depending (again, I kid you not) on the age of the recipient.
These stories are about love, dreams, loneliness, and that aching that comes from being alive, from connecting with some people and ceasing to connect with others... To give you an idea of the kind of fiction you'll be mixing with if you read it, imagine that the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Charles Baxter had a baby. These short short stories could be that offspring.
5.0 out of 5 stars
PagosaDon,
This review is from: Dream House: Stories (Series in Contemporary Fiction) (Hardcover)
Read BB's debut book in 2007. Picked it up again in 2008, and liked her short stories even more the second time around. I hope she develops one of the chapters into a full blown novel, if she already hasn't started one.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
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
