Short stories about off-beat New York personalities by a writer who lives and loves her characters.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Few debut story collections display the maturity, authenticity or versatility of Stapleton's, which focuses mainly (but not exclusively) on the lives of Filipino-Americans. Her characters move toward relationships either in hesitation or stark abandon, but always in believable ways. The title story relates a single afternoon in the lives of an immigrant family, an afternoon that anticipates the differing courses three sisters will take. Destiny and skin color are bound up in troublesome ways, both in that narrative and in "Pure Impending Glory," which follows a young professor, another child of immigrants, as she tries uneasily to fit in at her inhospitable small college and find a man to complement her: "Her preference for brown superseded her preference for intellect. Such were the circumstances that she often had to choose between them." Several tales are set in a nightmarish, alienating New York City, but Stapleton places others equally comfortably in the Philippines or in an unnamed Midwestern town. Likewise, she moves deftly between immigrant and American-born communities. This is an impressive collection, and each of the 12 short fictions is sure-footed enough to stand on its own.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
If Candace Bushnell had settled in Park Slope or Ann Arbor instead of Manhattan, Stapleton might have got herself a plagiarism suit. But as things turned out, this debut collection about young women trying to strike off on their own won its author the 1998 Columbia Journal fiction prize instead. Workshop prose can have a stultifying effect on the writer as well as the reader, and all the pieces here display that obsessive attention to voice at the expense of plot that one can only pick up in a classroom. To begin with, nearly every piece is a portrait rather than a story. The title one, for example, describes in pointlessly ominous detail a girl's decision to defy her family and go out on a date with a neighborhood tough. The resolution (the girl becomes pregnant and dies) is only hinted at, and in a way that adds more confusion than depth overall. Similarly, ``The Middle of October'' tells of an unpleasant first dateone that goes sour when the boy's mentally disturbed twin sister wanders in. The waitress of ``The Great Artist,'' who has recently settled in New York, dates a succession of bad men, while the child-care worker of ``No Such Absolute'' finds herself equally unable to connect (``Ana felt everyone was right when they said there are two kinds of men in the world''). The longest piece is ``Pure Impending Glory,'' which describes the slow coming of age of a woman from a poor family who goes to good schools, studies hard, and eventually becomes a college professor. Journeyman work of considerable talent but no originality whatsoever. If Stapleton can find a way of matching her imagination to her prose, shell have a good future ahead of her. But there's no sign of that here. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
An extraordinary collection by a new author,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing: Short Stories (Paperback)
Lara Stapleton's collection of short stories is a incredible debut that made me eager to see what this new author has in store for the future. Stapleton's prose slowly unveils the truth of the lives of her characters to the reader and, in doing so, provokes any reader to examine his or her own position in the world.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book I have read for years,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing: Short Stories (Paperback)
This is one of those reads that erases everything around you and takes you to that part of your brain where you notice the tiniest thing around you and suddenly the details seem almost holy. It's hard to put down, it's hard to come back to your regular life. Stapleton has a knack for exposing and dignifying the tiny crimes we commit as humans stumbling through the void. Her prose makes me want to stop everything and pay attention to the weave. I recommend this book to anyone with a hungry brain and a cobwebby soul.
5.0 out of 5 stars
DEPICTING THE BRUISE THE HEART TOO OFTEN BECOMES,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing: Short Stories (Paperback)
The following are excerpts from a review I wrote on Lara Stapleton's THE LOWEST BLUE FLAME BEFORE NOTHING (review posted on LocalVibe Internet).Life will always provide moments of loneliness, self-flaggellating doubts and immense frustrations. But when one is young, fresh out of college and just beginning a career, just starting to live -- like some of Stapleton's characters -- life can become so overwhelming that one simply wishes to hibernate in bed, the covers over one's head. In writing about this coming-of-age time, Stapleton depicts when the heart too often becomes a wound that simply won't heal. . . . Stapleton brings such life to her characters that the reader counts his/her blessings even as (metaphorical) tears may be shed in sympathy. However, it is also Stapleton's craftsmanship as a writer -- her deftness -- that prevents the stories from becoming maudlin. Stapleton offers mood pieces without sinking her coming-of-age stories into triteness. . . . And because THE LOWEST BLUE FLAME BEFORE NOTHING scarred my heart, I hope Stapleton in the future writes about "better moments" as well. The heart can only take so much pull from the gravity of black holes ever-present in the chaos of life.
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