Customer Reviews

Gay Street: Stories of Knoxville, Tennessee

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I spent the first 30 years of my life in Knoxville, so when Mauro mentions buying something on Market Street I remember the old Market House with its smells of fresh blood at the butcher's, sawdust and lilacs by the flower stalls. In my mind I see the row of farmer's dilapidated trucks parked alongside with their wooden boxes of fruits and vegetables fresh from the mountain truck farms -- bright green spinach and crisp green beans, sunny yellow squash and crimson strawberries.

He mentions Cherokee Hills and I remember Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills, where I grew up. At his reference to the S&W Cafeteria I think of Lois Harris playing the organ there on Thursday nights, and the Disney cartoons they showed for the children after dinner.

So this book is really two books for me. Mauro speaks of Knoxville of the 1980s and 1990s and makes me remember the Knoxville from 1940s to 1970s. So how could I not like the book?

Krutch Park didn't exist when I lived there, but I was born on Clinch Avenue at Fort Sanders Hospital. He mentions Highland Avenue and I remember that James Agee lived there even before my time and in the 1960s Hollywood came to town to make a movie of his book, DEATH IN THE FAMILY, starring Robert Preston.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a book I could barely read for the memories it prompts. I'm amused by the story of a young couple haunted by questions about a past they could never know -- 1952. It was that year and near that place when my date and I were returning to the parking lot from a movie at the Tennessee Theater one warm summer night and heard a woman scream. Could it have been...???

The World's Fair, the YMCA, the Bijou Theater, Gay and State Streets -- places in these stories that revive more memories from the Knoxville I knew.

Needless to say, reading this delightful look at contemporary Knoxville was not only a joy from the average reader's point of view, it was a trip into nostalgia. Mauro captures the new city and yet is able, at the same time, to retrieve the old for those who knew it.

Like Jack Mauro, my husband was born in New Jersey and fell in love with Knoxville when he came there as a young graduate student at UT. There is something magic about that place, and Mauro has done a fine job of putting some of that magic on the page.

Ruth Fulton Tiedemann

I have to say I wasn't eager to read this. A friend told me to buy a copy. Now I owe that friend a favor. This book is a series of stories, each one set in downtown Knoxville. Frankly I'm a little tired of this city's fascination with itself -- but this book takes Knoxville into the world. While the stories all take place here, they are so real and so human that the location doesn't matter. Mr. Mauro does manage to capture Southern quirkiness but the entire effect is a loving, sometimes sad and often funny look at just plain people. I think anyone could relate to these characters, or find them as interesting as I did. What's more, there's a wonderful balance between sadness and the humor of life both everyday or in the great turning points we face. I was sorry to come to the last story and I'll be looking out for Mauro's next effort.

A relative in TN sent me this book. I loved it. Don't think that because it is set in Knoxville it is limited - I would say that the author could change the names of the streets and the stories could be from anywhere. Each one is very real and true to life, even the stranger ones. I am reading it again, in fact!

Jack Mauro's writing style is always a pleasure. It's smooth and consistent, his stories are engaging, and his characters are a delight. I highly recommend this one and, after reading "Gay Street", I'm now looking forward to sinking into "Spite Hall".

As a fellow northerner who has made the south home, I was curious to read about Knoxville and it's inhabitants. The 14 stories of Gay Street are a masterful introduction to the town and its characters. Mr.Mauro has keen eyes and ears: from architectural detail to roommate's banter, each tale delights with lives and loves sharply observed. This book includes my new favorite Christmas story, "Holiday on High." It had me laughing and reading passages to friends.

The reader is offered the opportunity to put his eye behind Mr. Mauro's creative lens in order to examine the author's "catalog of possibilities." The insights into the human predicament are mesmerizing.

His characters are caringly wrapped in poetic prose which carries them from street corner to street corner, back and forth across Gay Street.

I would not attempt to select a favorite story because each thrives in the buzzing cluster to which it attaches.

I stopped at Gay St on my way home from vacation. It was like a vacant movie set. Stepping onto the street, I instantly imagined all of the characters in "Gay Street." Jack Mauro's close attention to the fine detail of a character conjurs up instant images of the peculiar and ordinary characters in this book. The stories are funny, as well as dramatic and ordinary. An entertaining book.

Few writers capture place as a character and do it well; Hemingway sometimes did, Faulkner always did, Fitzgerald did it once, and Jack Mauro has done it. The innocuous backdrop of place breathes in this book with a nearly tactile vitality. It seems an accident, this city insinuating itself, it is done so seamlessly. With prosaic loops of language more common among the Victorian Dickens and Elliot... we are spun through a rich fabric of characters whose most intense realizations are nearly swallowed in minutiae - on a back porch, a brisk walk through a snowy park; places where, if we have epiphanies at all, they are most likely to blindside us. The most striking facet of these stories is the sheer reality lurking therein. They resonate, but have no tangible reason to do so. There is a shadowy sebtext dodging our best efforts to lay hold and have done with it. You will carry these stories with you, or rather they will stubbornly insist you face them, long after the book is neatly inserted on my, er... your, third shelf.