A gracefully disconcerting collection of stories by the winner of the 2005 Narrative Prize. Wavering between fidelity and freedom, the women in this sparkling debut collection deal with emotional damage and unhealed heartbreak by plunging into unusual, often bizarre, relationships. In Pia Z. Ehrhardt¹s stories, adultery and impropriety become disquietingly mundane. Mothers expect daughters to be complicit in their love affairs, children seek shelter in families that aren¹t their own, fathers court their daughters, a couple enters into a marriage that lasts thirty days a year, and a young girl takes to the road with the simple guy who bags groceries at Piggly Wiggly while her mother imagines her safely at school. Beautifully restrained and shot through with tenderness, Famous Fathers and Other Stories establishes Ehrhardt as both a leading practitioner of the short story and an empathetic interpreter of the lives of wounded people who-instead of asking for what they want-take what is offered.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The lives of the women who populate the stories of this debut collection, set in and around New Orleans, deal to one degree or another with adultery, some with eroticized children. In "Running the Room," the narrator ferries her mother on regular trips to the city so her mother can carry on an affair under of the guise of cooking school classes, and in doing so, gets tempted herself. In "Tell Me in Italian," the narrator helps her mother catch her father in his love nest. The narrator of "Abita Springs" orchestrates an odd relationship between her husband and sister, while "Stop" and the title story careen uneasily into tales of Daddy's little girl gone incestuous. The women seem passive, grasping at something or someone to take them out of themselves and filled with guilt or self-disgust that becomes inertia. Ehrhardt codes in an oblique affection for her characters that works from story to story in a collection with a bleak take on relationships, marriage and family.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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More About the Author
PIA Z. EHRHARDT'S stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's, Mississippi Review, Oxford American, and Narrative Magazine, and have been anthologized in Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe and New Sudden Fiction: Short-Shorts from America and Beyond. Her short story collection, Famous Fathers & Other Stories was published by MacAdam/Cage (June 2007). Her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and can be heard on KQED Radio. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and the 2005 Narrative Prize. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and son.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elegant stories of loss and hope,
By
This review is from: Famous Fathers & Other Stories (Paperback)
Pia Z. Ehrhardt's stories are a pleasure to read, even when the people (and they feel like people, not characters) are suffering. She understands the mistakes we make, and the sometimes clumsy gestures we offer, afterwards. Her stories, mostly set in New Orleans, are lush and atmospheric, but the focus is always on the heart. Ehrhardt is too honest to offer easy solutions--she understands that love is a serious, messy business--but she honors the effort. Each story arrives fully bloomed--the shorter stories work as glimpes, broken snapshots--but her longer stories, like Alice Munro's, carry the emotional weight of novels. Forgiveness is everything. My favorites are "Driveway" and "The Longest Part of the Day," but every story here, every sentence, is a hard-won gift.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Smashing debut collection,
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This review is from: Famous Fathers & Other Stories (Paperback)
Do not be fooled into thinking the female protagonists in this knock-out debut are passive. They are not.
This is not the 19th century--there is no awakening. This woman is not about to head into the ocean. She's already there, already reborn, and she's taken charge. She's in control. She's got her own place and she's generous with her freedom. But like the levee, the reservoir, the water tower, the bridges--she is contained, but just barely. And the men who believe they are restraining her, who believe they have the upper hand, aren't and don't. Even in the waterless landscape--the desert--she remains in control, because after all she lives. She rises again like Lazarus--and she is her own Jesus (not the fellow who gives her a ride to the hospital. He's made to seem important, but we know she would have lived whether he came along or not). Like the levees we are all so familiar with now in the post-Katrina world, if you make the wrong move, if you push her too far, the woman will break free. She will flood her restraints--she will take over your streets, your house. She will send you fleeing from the city you love. But she doesn't do this in these stories--she keeps herself as much in check as she can stand. And why? Well, for love. Love is the ultimate prize, the gift. She will do just about anything for love--and truthfully she finds getting it from men easy enough. So what is she seeking then? What is it that drives her? The key is in her relationships with other women--the mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, other wives--living and dead. These are the people who have power over her. These are the relationships that are tricky, that require finesse. These are the relationship which frustrate and devastate and maybe even leave her feeling powerless, though not beaten. She will keep at it, keep trying to understand because that is what will bring some relief to the hurt: empathy. The famous fathers? Well, they're really just a way to try to understand the distant mother--the one whose high-heeled footsteps you hear echoing on the floors down below you--walking away, loud on wood, on tile, and muted with carpet. But always--always--with the father following behind, and the daughter left to wonder if she will ever return. An absolutely smashing collection which will leave you with Ehrhardt's powerful and confident voice ringing in your ears. If you are anything like me, you'll find yourself dog earing every other page so that you can go back and read a certain passage again, relish it. These stories will grab onto you and not let go anytime soon--and you won't want them to. Read it.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's a good thing that adultery is so terrible . . .,
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This review is from: Famous Fathers & Other Stories (Paperback)
A character in one of these short stories expresses herself by quoting famous people, and as I neared the end of this outstanding collection, I thought of General Sherman's observation, "It is well that war is so terrible--or men would love it too much." These stories seem to say "It is just as well that adultery is so terrible, or men and women would love it too much."
Except for the very first one, these stories are beautiful and true. The most attractive and characteristic element of Pia Ehrhardt's writing is her unique voice and narrative persona, which is simultaneously energetic, observant, sensitive, sensuous as well as sensual, and honest, but also cold, ruthless, matter-of-fact, skittering along the edge of deception and self-deception (but almost always saved by the authorial consciousness floating above), and deeply funny. Being funny requires a writer to maintain perspective, and an often painfully honest perspective also generates the honesty in the voice and narrative persona of these stories. Nietzsche couldn't resist cheap shots, and he wrote things he knew to be untrue just because they were witty, but in the imaginative world of FAMOUS FATHERS, humour is always true, always honest, always cleansing--even if having alcohol poured over an open wound hurts like hell.
The short story, FAMOUS FATHERS makes me realise, is the perfect form for depicting adultery--a drama of concentrated choice, a fateful act, the fulfillment of a doomed wish. There is no future to adultery, because if there is, it becomes something else. Is it a coincidence that some of the greatest works of literature have adultery as the mainspring of their plots--THE ILIAD, the AGAMEMNON of Aeschylus, the story of David and Bathsheba (and poor Uriah the Hittite), MADAME BOVARY, and ANNA KARENINA? These works all go on to explore other aspects of life, but Ehrhardt stays intensely focused on adultery itself, and her fascination, her attraction to it, and her honesty make these stories extremely compelling.
The range and depth of Ehrhardt's treatment of the subject can be seen in excerpts from two stories. The story "Stop" closes with a beautifully seductive image of the momentary freedom and joy that adultery offers: "Try to forget that jumping-on-a-tramopoline feeling, when life is the top of the bounce, and the view up there is scary and crazy and sweet. The two of you with your hair flying, his unbuttoned shirt caping behind him, and eight feet of air under your feet." But these, and other passages describing the attractions of adultery are balanced by the deeper truth revealed in the story "How it Floods", in the context of a character's child: "I pray that he falls in love the way other people fall in love, where it's just a gift offered by a man and a woman at about the same time, where their hearts are flying toward one another, sure and scared."
Unlike the primitive and emotionally stunted content of "Adult" entertainment fare, these stories really are for adults, for those willing to humbly, honestly, and observantly read about, and reflect on, the inexplicable, and finally unknowable, desires of the human heart.
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