The Famous Thing About Death: And Other Stories [Paperback]

Lisa Sandlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1996

stories by the author of "Afoot in a Field of Men"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Thick with a variety of voices and personalities, this promising debut short-fiction collection marks Sandlin as a writer to watch. "Jimmy's Eye" is an unsentimental account of the white man's decimation of the Taskachulo Indians of Texas; five years after the government uproots them to arid New Mexico, Uncle Sam picks off the flower of the tribe--six young men with astonishing eyesight--for a punishing stint in the Great War. In the title story, an aging ballet dancer is betrayed by her once perfectly toned body as well as by neighbors who commit her to a nursing home after they hear her arguing with a long-dead husband. The mind of his father, Jude, was destroyed by poison gas in the Great War and his mother has deserted the family, but Ardie Polk of "Dear General" ministers to Jude with great sensitivity, even though Ardie "has a heartache. It's an intense, sunken kind of feeling, as if his heart is submerged in a lake, drifting barely above silt-bottom." As Sandlin envisions it, life is a precarious but precious burden. She conjures a single mother who chafes at her impotence in protecting her young son; an "angel" of a young man, every mother's dream for her daughter, who attacks his date; and a brother and sister who, alienated from the family because of their parents' constant bickering, are brought together after the brother's debilitating accident.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press; 1st edition (July 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093831713X
• ISBN-13: 978-0938317135
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,349,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lisa Sandlin was born in the Gulf Coast oil town of Beaumont, Texas, and lived there before and after a transfer sent her family to Naples, Italy, for three years. She graduated from Rice University in Houston and then lived many years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Once she had earned an M.F.A. in Writing at Vermont College, Sandlin packed a small car and headed for Nebraska in January. She taught at Wayne State College 1997-2009, with semester leaves to teach at The University of Texas and Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey. Sandlin's fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Crazy Horse, StoryQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere and her nonfiction in The New York Times Book Review and in anthologies. Her books are The Famous Thing About Death (Cinco Puntos Press, 1991); Message to the Nurse of Dreams (Cinco Puntos Press, 1997), winner of the Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League and the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; In the River Province (Southern Methodist University Press, 2004), a finalist for the Jones award; and the forthcoming You Who Make the Sky Bend, a collaboration with New Mexican retablo artist Catherine Ferguson (Pinyon Publishing). Sandlin also served as a co-editor of Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (2002) from Omaha's own Backwaters Press. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.