Holding Pattern: Stories [Paperback]

Jeffery Renard Allen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2008

The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short-story collection is a place like no other. A recognizable city, certainly, but one in which a man might sprout wings or copper pennies might fall from the skies onto your head. Yet these are no fairy tales. The hostility, the hurt, is all too human.

The protagonists circle each other with steely determination: a grandson taunts his grandmother, determined to expose her secret past; for years, a sister tries to keep a menacing neighbor away from her brother; and in the local police station, an officer and prisoner try to break each other’s resolve.

In all the stories, Allen calibrates the mounting tension with exquisite timing, in mesmerizing prose that has won him comparisons with Joyce and Faulkner. Holding Pattern is a captivating collection by a prodigiously talented writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works—in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings. In It Shall Be Again, more of a prose poem than a story, characters open their mouths to catch a thick dirty rain of pennies. Some stories lack cohesiveness, and although Allen isn't attempting to write traditional pieces, the stories would benefit from coherency. Even in the weaker entries, though, Allen delivers striking images—two brothers chewing on wads of toilet paper, a scalp that looks like watermelon meat chewed down to the rind. It is these images, rather than particular events or characters, that leave the strongest impressions. Though scattered cultural references and spot-on dialogue root these stories mainly in the present, they have a distinct feeling of being outside of time. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Whiting Award winner Allen’s distinctive and potent debut, the novel Rails under My Back (1999), aligned him with the likes of Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, and his first short story collection is equally powerful. Profoundly interiorized and subtly otherworldly, each tale is electric with the rising tension that proceeds stormy weather; each tale is a veritable boxing match, as characters trapped in impossible situations feint, jab, and retreat. A number of tales are relayed through the questioning mind of various characters named Hatch. Young Hatch watches his mother like a hawk, surmises that his grandmother is a phony, and spies on his brother, Cosmo. There is much to mull over about race, poverty, language, lies, desperation, and liberation as Allen assembles just the right sensuous and psychological details to bring into focus a city resembling Chicago and a brooding southern setting. Extreme cold and heat, family strife, troubles over money and sex, all is in play, all is mysterious, dangerous, and urgent. With pitch-perfect dialogue and centrifugal force, Allen’s stories pull you down into the misery of the daily hustle and spit you out on the lonely crossroads between reality and myth, where the archetypes roam and trust is but a dream. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 227 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; First Edition. pb original edition (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555975097
• ISBN-13: 978-1555975098
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,433,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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