Dream State: Stories [Hardcover]

Moira Crone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

Moira Crone's acclaimed book, Dream State (University Press of Mississippi now available in a $14.95 paperback and an $18.95 hardback) contains award-winning stories that radiate from the Louisana landscape and observe the twisted romance and fabulous ironies that resound in this fecund, steamy terrain.

"It's interesting to live in a place so many people dream about," Crone, professor of creative writing at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says. "Sometimes it's hard to live out your own dreams, maybe because it's hard to tell which dreams are yours."

The New York Times Book Review says, "Dream State successfully presents a fresh version of the deep South, one that is exotic without being either grotesque or romanticized."

In the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Susan Larson says, "Crone renders the place with an immigrant's clarity and an adopted daughter's solid affection. To read Dream State is to surrender to her spell, a powerful potion of beautiful humor, and keen insight."

Crone writes with equal grace about failed movie stars, environmental lawyers, residents of the French Quarter, or models from uptown New Orleans. Her work explores politics, love, immigration, and marriage.

Lee Smith characterizes her prose as "precise and hallucinatory at the same time. Each of these wonderful tales is as complex as any novel, as vivid and fast and surprising as your life."

Moira Crone, who lives in New Orleans, is also the author of the novel A Period of Confinement and the story collection The Winnebago Mysteries. In addition to magazines like the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, and Family Circle, her stories have appeared in Best New Stories from the South and New Stories from Southern Women.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

``Everybody is real [sic] the same. Not some more real and some less,'' observes the narrator of the title tale of this new collection of eight stories from Crone (The Winnebago Mysteries). This book, which won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize, concerns a declining movie star who returns to her Louisiana hometown to escape a scandal in Hollywood. Indeed, the strength of Crone's short fiction is the realism that the author grants to her characters and their situations: a divorced couple meeting over dinner in New Orleans to discuss their daughter's schooling, in the process reawakening tender feelings for each other (``There is a River in New Orleans''); an unemployed father of a baby girl who has an affair with a teenager while his wife is away on business (``Fever''). All the stories are set in Louisiana (Crone teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University), depicted as a culturally hybrid landscape where traditional rules collide with individual desires. The psychological aspects of most of the tales, generally voiced by forthcoming, self-reflective narrators, seem obvious. While readers may appreciate the accessibility and earnestness of the collection, they won't have to strain to figure out the kind of world Crone is creating for her characters: one marked by confusion about self, love and future.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

Eight deliciously irreverent stories in which love, politics, shady deals, hurricanes, and sweet fevers blend in contemporary Louisiana --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 189 pages
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi (Trd); First Edition edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878058133
• ISBN-13: 978-0878058136
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,671,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New York Times Book Review RAVE, December 8, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dream State: Stories (Hardcover)

Louisiana Limbo Date: October 29, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Gary Krist; Lead: DREAM STATE Stories. By Moira Crone. 189 pp. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $18.95. Text: THE house of fiction may be a mansion with many rooms, but if you read a lot of book reviews, you can be excused for thinking of it sometimes as a cramped two-bedroom cottage. Has there been any coming-of-age novel written in the last generation that hasn't been likened by one reviewer or another to "The Catcher in the Rye"? Has any recent author of terse short stories not been accused of engaging in Raymond Carver minimalism? And what writer from south of the Mason-Dixon line has ever escaped allegations of influence by William Faulkner? Well, I defy any critic to liken Moira Crone, the Southern author of "Dream State," to William Faulkner. True, the title story in this smart and exhilarating second collection of stories did win something called the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Award, and the action of all eight stories does take place in the Deep South, much of it amid the gorgeous dishevelment of New Orleans. But the sensibility embodied in Ms. Crone's energetic fiction owes little to Faulkner -- or, for that matter, to Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy or John Kennedy Toole. I'm happy to report that it is utterly sui generis. Take the title story. It begins with a flourish of narrative confidence: "I'm assuming you know who Jessica Broussard is." Of course we do. She's the beautiful, elusive movie star hounded out of Hollywood because of some unnamed scandal, retreating from public view to reinvent herself in picturesque exile. We see her through the eyes of Beryl, her real estate agent, who must help the actress find an appropriate house in her native St. Sebastianville, La. Beryl -- intelligent, witty and irrepressibly articulate -- is no simpering groupie, yet she cannot help being mesmerized by her client's larger-than-life existence. Too shrewd to be a romantic, yet too full of yearning to embrace mundane reality without a fight, Beryl finds herself forced to decide whether Jessica's bankrupt magic is worth the hefty price of belief. Ultimately -- and fortunately -- the mathematics of that equation prove to be anything but simple. Many of Ms. Crone's characters are, like Beryl, adrift, as confused as they are self-aware, as uncertain of what they want to say as they are forthcoming. Often they are transplanted Northerners, dreaming passively of a different life elsewhere -- in San Francisco or Vermont or Jerusalem. They feel trapped in Louisiana, where "all the big questions are still left open . . . are women people, did Elvis die, was slavery wrong?" Their friends, calling long-distance from places other than the Deep South, places that are not weather-beaten and financially depressed and dangerously close to electing David Duke governor, ask them why they are living there. Typically, Ms. Crone's narrators cannot answer this question. They feel dissatisfied, in limbo -- and yet they don't leave. In "Gauguin," for instance, an environmental lawyer named Paul must endure a final Southern assault -- Hurricane Andrew -- before taking off to pursue a sensible romance on Cape Cod. The big wind, however, ends up overturning Paul's plans like so much lawn furniture. Somehow he finds himself canceling his trip north, succumbing to a "sweet homesickness" for the physical and emotional chaos of Louisiana. LIKE the husband in the story "Fever," who jeopardizes his practical marriage by having an affair with a loopy Cajun singer from the local copy shop, Paul eventually makes what seems a totally irrational choice -- taking up with the unbearable divorced mother across the street. As the title "Gauguin" may suggest, there is arguably something patronizing in Ms. Crone's stance toward Louisiana culture. Her fascination with Cajuns, Creoles and various French Quarter types often smacks of well-meaning anthropology, her Northern Gauguins casting off the chill of civilization to experience a more intense life in more colorful climes. On balance, however, Ms. Crone's take on the territory is complex enough to transcend this kind of sentimentality. "Dream State" successfully presents a fresh version of the Deep South, one that is exotic without being either grotesque or romanticized.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sets the Mood for Your Next Visit to N.O., December 29, 2002

By 

C. Ryan (Winthrop, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream State (Paperback)

I enjoy visiting New Orleans, and the tendency is to just read guides and history books. But excellent fiction, such as Ms. Crone's Dream States, provides as much, or more, insight into the local scene and what makes southern Louisiana unique and worth visiting. Each of the eight stories introduces different characters who provide a cross section of local attitudes, vocabulary, world view and adaptation to one of the few remaining authentic regional cultures in the United States. Highly recommended.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful stories!!, January 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dream State: Stories (Hardcover)

I read this book and it changed my life. These are the best stories I've ever read about New Orleans and Louisiana. Crone has a sharp witty eye, deft ear, and language that will set you free. Read this book and pass it on to a friend.