Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA [Hardcover]

Bathsheba Monk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

It's pretty much a straight shot from the upstate New York towns of Richard Russo's books to Bathsheba Monk’s Cokesville, PA. This is coal and steel country. The sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck—and two inches means a fat one. And what's the best make-out spot in town? Next to the burning slag heap.

In seventeen beguiling, linked stories, spanning fourty-five years, Monk brings a corner of America alive as never before. Her world bursts with indelible characters: Mrs. Szilborski, who bakes great cake, but sprays her neighbors’ dogs with mace; and Mrs. Wojic, who believes her husband was reincarnated—as one of those dogs. Then there is the younger generation: Annie Kusiak , who wants to write, and Theresa Gojuk, who dreams of stardom. Cokesville is their Yoknapatawpha; they ache to escape it and the ghosts of their ancestors and the regret of their parents. What ghosts—and what regrets! When Theresa’s father Bruno falls into a vat of molten steel, the mill gives the family an ingot roughly his weight to bury.

As deliciously wry as Allegra Goodman in The Family Markowitz, and with the matter-of-fact humanity of Grace Paley, Bathsheba Monk leads us into a world that is at once totally surprising and recognizable. These stories glow like molten steel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This debut collection weaves together generations of several smalltown Polish-American families living in Cokesville, Pa., a fictional coal-mining and steelmaking town. Annie Kusiak narrates several stories, and despite several false starts—including failures as a student, converting to Judaism and attempting suicide—she makes it out of Cokesville, only to discover its citizens still have a vise-like hold on her imagination. After 30 years, Mrs. Szilborski turns on her neighbor Mrs. Wojic and her two dogs, one of which Mrs. Wojic believes is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Bruno Gojuk, after falling into a vat of molten steel, draws the whole town to his funeral, not for the grisly spectacle of man turned to metal, but for a chance to rub shoulders with (and size up) his runaway daughter, Theresa, now a sitcom star and the wife of a black man. Monk grew up in a coal-mining family, did a stint in the army and now lives in Allentown, Pa. The interlocking structure allows her to cover 40 years and several locales with ease. The people and situations are not particularly appealing, but Monk's unsentimental, deadpan touch with her characters is winning. (June)
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From The New Yorker

Monk, who grew up in Pennsylvania coal-and-steel country, sets her stories in the fictional town of Cokesville, where gardens grow through slag heaps, women scrub their sidewalks free of soot, and men scrounge for jobs that are likely to kill or maim. Set mostly among Polish immigrants and their descendants over a forty-year period, the stories use deadpan humor to combat a sense of hopelessness and economic futility. The most compelling are narrated by an adolescent would-be writer determined to avoid the "lava show" make-out spot, where carts dump molten coke and girls her age get pregnant. Even those who escape, however, can't seem to free themselves from the slow burn of their heritage, much like a decades-old underground coal fire, ignited "when someone dumped a load of garbage down a mine shaft."
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374223300
• ISBN-13: 978-0374223304
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,349,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I live in Allentown, PA, a post-industrial city which is in the middle of tremendous changes and I am meeting people who have come from all over the world to make a go of it here. It's been said before but I have to say it again: details may vary, but the human story is the same everywhere and no less moving no matter how many times the tale is told. If I cry when I'm writing a story, I know I'm getting it right! My new book, Nude Walker, is a story that was born in Allentown about the different forces, groups, interests that are trying to be heard and live here. If you live in America, the characters in Nude Walker will resonate with you. If you live elsewhere, this is what it's like.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars cautionary and provocative, Cokesville short stories burn with incandescent fury, March 4, 2008

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA (Kindle Edition)

Appropriately titled, "Now You See It...Stories from Cokesville" describes the existence and sudden disappearance of a Pennsylvania mining town. The immigrant miners who toil in desperately difficult circumstances and their children who either similarly submerge themselves into the mines or who desperately seek to leave lead fractured, hard lives. Author Bathsheba Monk mixes magical realism, incongruous happenings and a deep respect for the consequences of misery in her seventeen connected short stories. Despite the somewhat uneven quality of several stories, the result is a compelling, forceful and foreboding depiction of a way of life that once defined our national experience and has since been outsourced.

Annie Kusiak, whose character development is the strongest thread interweaving the short stories, represents the disillusion, resentment and frustration of second-generation Cokesville residents. She flees the danger and bleak hopelessness of the community but fails to eradicate its impact on her life. The adult Annie, bouncing from one unsatisfying relationship to another, laments having "lost our...connection to the earth...like balloons that some child has carelessly released." Hardly "recognizable...soon no one will see us and it will be as if we never existed." If nothing else, those who survive Cokesville are tough cookies. For instance, Annie off-handedly describes how coal companies return one-hundred-seventy-five pound ingots to families whose men have fallen into vats of molten steel. In Cokesville, "people found it as normal to view a 'Made in USA' stamp on a slab of steel as it was to view a face made up with lipstick" in a coffin.

The characters of Cokesville are lost souls, and it is not uncommon for them to simply disappear, some by virtue of the lures of a sexy magician, others, like Theresa Gojuk, to Hollywood. One of the most plaintive is the spinster Margaret, who thwarted ambitions for love leads her to ask the most elemental questions about life: "Is it possible to cease to exist because no one is paying attention to you?" Margaret speaks for all lost souls when she cries, "If you become invisible, are you already dead?"

In this respect Bathsheba Monk makes her art a form of social protest. Today, in the world of NAFTA and free trade, who other than artists decry the forced extinction of towns that provided the very resources that made the United States a world power? Who other than story tellers can relate the acute loneliness, social marginalization and unarticulated pain miners harvested with every chunk of coal extracted from the bowels of the earth? Monk makes us recognize that no matter how hard anyone hopes to escape a defining environment, disappearing is no easy task.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Return of the Native, June 13, 2006

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D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA (Hardcover)

Like, I suppose, many readers, I bought this on the strength of the wonderful New York Times magazine piece. In that piece an uppity ex-pat returns to her decaying native rustbelt town, confidently believing that "home-keeping youths have ever homely wit" and tactlessly attempts to instruct the local yokels in ways of escape..
That clash remains a theme of this book. It also displays the same mordant wit. The humor is black and bitter and often has death as a topic. The steel mills and coal mines that are closing down were hideously dangerous, but the close-knit ethnic Slavic community suffers from their passing.
It's a collection of inter-related stories containing the ghost of a novel. The novel would have been about the Gojuck and Kusiak families. Their daughters, Theresa and Annie escape from Cokesville, Pennsylvania to Los Angeles and Boston, and hook up with Jews and Episcopalians, but keep getting reluctantly pulled back to their roots. Some of the stories that were not about members of the two families were brilliant but distracted from what could have been an even better novel.. I suspect that Bathsheba (love that name) Monk could not bear to leave out her best bits, which is understandable because some of them are very good indeed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bathsheba Monks Enlightens and Delights, June 7, 2006

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Clarence B. Carter "Blake Carter" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA (Hardcover)

Bathsheba Monk's "Now You See It... Tales from Cokesvillem PA" is one of the finest story collections that I've ever read. She portrays the citizens of a decaying rust belt city--those who stayed and those who left--with compassion and intelligence, charm and sensitivity, grace and wit. This is a book that will make you both laugh and cry. A must.