Key West Tales: Stories [Hardcover]

John Hersey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 14, 1993

Alternating a tale of the past that has become a part of Key West legend with a contemporary story that reflects the pulse of life there today, Hersey weaves in these stories a brilliant human tapestry of the place that means a great deal to him. From the author of A Bell For Adano and Hiroshima comes this final collections of stories.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This posthumous collection of stories, set in a place Hersey loved, may be the last work we shall see from this greatly gifted writer. It is a curious collection, blending fully realized fictional stories with real-life happenings in the Key's long history that are little more than anecdotes, richly embellished by the author. These are mildly enjoyable but quite forgettable. By far the most substantial story, "Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed" (the quotation is from Thomas Herrick), is a startling departure for Hersey, being about an aging and once rather ruthless gay professor dying of AIDS, and the bickering over his care and with his awful family. It is full of tender observation, often funny, and ultimately poignant--and nothing else in the collection is on the same level. A much more conventional story (and a more predictable one from the author), "Piped Over the Side," is about a naval officer's ambivalent feelings toward his retirement ceremony. "The Two Lives of Consuela Castanon" is a wry tale about a deliciously fat young woman and a lover who, unhappily for her, likes her just the way she is. "Fantasy Fest" has a woman anxiously seeking her natural son, adopted as a baby, in the whirl of a Halloween parade. Everything here is smooth and professional, if occasionally rather trite ("Page Two" and "A Game of Anagrams"). Only the AIDS story shows Hersey really moving on into new and tougher-minded terrain.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When John Hersey died earlier this year, he left a legacy of 25 books, 15 fiction and ten nonfiction. In this final collection of stories, Hersey focuses on his theme of ordinary people facing momentous events in their lives: death by AIDS, the death of a friend from AIDS, loss of innocence and virginity, meeting the son one had given up for adoption two decades before, or retirement from military service. Hersey presents as interludes brief, italicized vignettes of the famous or powerful people who have lived in or visited Key West. Hersey makes the ordinary folk heroic and the famous venal, sometimes to odd effect: The venality of the famous can be more engaging than the substantiveness of the obscure, perhaps because the latter lack the fullness of character that would make them more appealing. Still, this final collection is recommended.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (December 14, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679429921
• ISBN-13: 978-0679429920
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,231,475 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine career capper for a veteran story-teller, March 29, 2002

By 

Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Key West Tales: Stories (Hardcover)

I was somewhat baffled and unimpressed by THE CHILD BUYER (1960) when it was assigned to me in high school and never bothered to read another thing by John Hersey. I bought KEY WEST TALES because (a) I had recently been to Key West, and (b) being a collection of short stories, I knew I could jump to another story if I didn't like the one I was reading.

This collection of stories, more than anything, reminded me of Sherwood Anderson's WINESBURG, OHIO. I have become distrustful of fiction writers who load up their characters with endearing (or annoying) idiosyncrasies in order to make them more memorable (as much as I enjoyed Berendt's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, I suspect he indulged in this vice a bit). Like the citizens of Winesburg, Ohio, Hersey's Key West natives are believable people experiencing a plausible share of dissonance with the world they seem trapped in. The result is often poignant, as in "The Two Lives of Consuela Castanon," the story of an obese young receptionist who resists, then acquiesces to the advances of a handsome young man not from Key West. In fact, Hersey comes close to replicating the eeriness and desperation of Shirley Jackson's "The Daemon Lover." The best crafted story in the collection is "Fantasy Fest," a story about a woman who has been contacted by the son she had put up for adoption when he was an infant. In his letter to her he suggests that they each dress up as "their own particular fantasy" about themselves and join in Key West's Halloween parade. He is confident that using this ploy they will both be naturally drawn to one another. Does it work? Do they meet? I wouldn't dream of spoiling the story for you. The longest story in the collection, "Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed," is the story of a gay man dying of AIDS and of the people in his life. This is no TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. The relationships are complex and unsentimental. Like Anderson, Hersey does not people his world with saintly or purely wicked folk. It's a fallen world, for sure, one peopled with sinners, many of whom act with the best intentions.

Intercut with the short stories are fictionalized glimpses of Key West's history and legends. Neither Hersey, his widow, nor his editor reveals the publication history of the pieces that make up this collection, but I suspect the "historical" pieces were items Hersey wrote for the local newspaper. Taken together, they give the reader a sense of place. Key West is more that the southernmost town in the United States, a tourist destination, or a gay haven. It's a place with a history, a place that has always honored independent thinking. The historical vignettes bring more than color to this collection, they provide its spine.

This collection is Hersey's swan song...and he sings it well.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Key West is amazing and Hersey captures the place perfectly!, March 28, 2001

By 

Arthur L. Hellyer (Oswego, IL United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Key West Tales: Stories (Hardcover)

Hersey's book is much like Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific." Of course the destiny of the world isn't on the line here, but the sense of wonder, so much a part of Michener's tales, permeates this book. Anyone who loves a place with a unique and special local history or stories of real people in an exotic locale, should relish this book. It may be a bit slow for a few, but for many the rewards will be great.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real Life in Paradise, April 6, 2004

By 

Born to Read - See all my reviews

This review is from: Key West Tales: Stories (Paperback)

As a rule, I don't favor short story collections. A writer needs time to conjure up a real world in words, and once I find such a world to enjoy, I want to remain there for a long time. But when I looked for a book that would deliver a flavor of our southern-most city, I found "Key West Tales." It did not disappoint.

Hersey's modern-day tales of this flamboyant place are raw slices of life, with nary a bougainvillea blossom or swaying palm frond to introduce a bit of tropical mellowness. In this book, irony rules: a man, laid low by AIDS, is robbed of his persona as well as his health; a fat Latino woman is offered a too-good-to-be-true chance at happiness; a woman who escaped to Key West after a divorce gets yanked back into a former life with a letter from the son she gave up for adoption.

Interspersed with the modern tales are briefly-told legends of this legend-rich place: of the wreckers and salvors, eagerly awaiting the next ship-wreck; of the distinguished Audubon, massacring the birds that would make him famous; of a greatly-subdued Jefferson Davis coming to dinner after his imprisonment. Normally I am a stickler for wanting to know what is fact and what is fiction (see my review of "The DaVinci Code," which transgressed in this respect). But for these short and delicious yarns, which lie somewhere between fiction and obviously-embellished fact, I make an exception.

Curiously, while the longer, modern-day tales are peopled with characters who might just as well have lived in, say, San Francisco, I found them dripping with what I, a non-Key-Wester, perceive to be the mood of Key West. For all its physical beauty, perfect weather, and goofiness, Key West is, after all, a place of real people. And ironically, that the characters in this book live in Paradise makes their joys and woes seem all the more poignantly real.