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Nude in Tub: Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine [Hardcover]

G. K. Wuori (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)


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Book Description

March 1, 1999
Here is G.K. Wuori, out of nowhere and wielding a deadly weapon: his vision of our America...it's the raw.

Wuori fiction is something entirely and wildly its own. Like Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Mark Richard, Lewis Nordan, Wuori doesn't care to mollycoddle the reader. He's here, in this daring debut collection, to reflect what's on his mind: America's fascination with violence, with sex, with racism, with joyful immortality.

Set in the northernmost corner of Maine, in a town "usually omitted from cheap maps," Nude in Tub is about a young couple who make love on La-Z-Boys in the middle of a highway, about an old woman who finds a pine tree growing from her leg, about newlyweds who paint their whole house black and themselves white, and about several more stripped-down others, including, of course, a nude in tub.

Descendants of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburgers, Wuori's Quillifarkeagans are Americans at the millenium, good citizens whose reality has been tweaked, twitted, quirked, smirked and found to be grimly goofy. These people - each of them caught in their own startling moment of nakedness - all live by the same credo: If you're in trouble, we'll help. But we'll still laugh like hell.


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"WELCOME OR NOT, IT'S UP TO YOU," reads a sign on the outskirts of Quillifarkeag, Maine. Usually left off cheap maps, but not necessarily found on the expensive ones either, remote little Quilli lies "tucked like a bug between the buttocks of Quebec on one side and New Brunswick on the other." Winters are long in Quilli, and the township is tolerant of what its citizens do to keep themselves amused. "Just a young married couple," is what Quilli says when Fence and Alice paint their house--and its windows--pitch black, in a story called "Condoms." "Just a young married couple," even when their first pet of choice turns out to be a "frozen chicken--still feathered, eyes cloudy enough to make it look a little heartsick--tied to a rope on the porch just off the dooryard."

Quillifarkeag is not just a township, then, as G.K. Wuori writes in the foreword to this odd little book; it's a state of mind, "one marked by innocence and regret, by guile and sympathy." Wuori's off-kilter tales start out conventionally enough, but grow darker and more violent as the book progresses. A couple interrupts a holdup, then turn the tables on their torturers in "Revenge"; a woman finds a pine tree growing from her leg in "Glory"; novelist Stephen King is called in to witness the legacy of a factory massacre in "Parents." No one says or does the expected in Quillifarkeag, and Wuori writes prose to match; you can never quite predict where one of his sentences will end up. These stories show his characters in often unflattering light, yet they're never stripped of their dignity: it's the truth, not naked but nude. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

By ancient or calculated violence, the peculiar characters of Wuori's first collection of stories seem always to be shooting themselves in the foot (or the eye, or the arm, or the laid-bare heart). Residents of Quillifarkeag, a town so far north in Maine that Quillifarkeagans "stare off into the nearby nothingness of Canada, a nothingness that had the appeal of the back door to a house where a domestic dispute was going on," the people Wuori presents in these 18 candid shorts act from the gut. The attitude expressed by Claire, the intelligent young protagonist in "Parents" who is leading Stephen King around the abandoned factory where years ago her janitor mother slaughtered umpteen co-workers, echoes through the collection. Resolute and unsentimental, she says: "I think sometimes killing just has to happen, that there's a sloughing off of something and a molting into something else." In "Revenge," Johnny and Janice get the best of the thieves who rob their gas station and rape Jan by demanding more than just an eye for an eye. Love creeps in among all the brutality, as in "Nude," in which the town clerk comes to accept an awful tragedy through his unreciprocated feelings for his boss, the mayor, Liselle. When these stories fail, it is because their brevity leaves too much untold, relying instead on the power of eccentricity. But when they succeed, which is more often the case, it is on account of Wuori's strong taste for the out-of-whack and his considerable ability to render the depravity of humankind with humor and good will. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 294 pages
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (March 1, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1565122232
  • ISBN-13: 978-1565122239
  • Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,395,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Garrison Keillor meets Stephen King!, March 26, 2000
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This review is from: Nude in Tub: Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine (Hardcover)
Fans of the odd need look no further, Nude in Tub is your book. Dark humor abounds in these stories of small-town life viewed from a weird and often warped perspective. Written in a style that might be called Garrison Keillor meets Stephen King, the author creates a world of rather humdrum characters who just happen to have a few quirks. This isn't Lake Wobegon! The residents tend to behave in rather bizarre fashion and suffer grotesquely bad luck. In fact, grotesque may be the best word to describe this book. Just understand that in this instance "grotesque" is good!

While not a book for everyone, those who enjoy fiction written with a disturbing and unsettling sense of humor should take a chance on Nude in Tub. I was hooked from the very first line of the first chapter, "To die in winter in a far northern place is to become a storage problem."

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't make myself finish, June 13, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Nude in Tub: Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine (Hardcover)
Bought this book based on an interesting sounding review in a magazine. The first couple stories were ok. After that they started to make less and less sense. I finally skimmed the rest looking for something I wanted to read, and couldn't find anything. Glad I bought this used, sorry I wasted even that much money.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Winesburg Ohio Meets Twin Peaks!, April 6, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Nude in Tub: Stories of Quillifarkeag, Maine (Hardcover)
Don't read this book if you can't take a joke. Read it if you want hilarious and macabre insights into the human heart. Read it if you find our violent world both troubling and fascinating. Many of the stories are shocking--both in terms of their subject matter and their quality. Well worth checking out.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
To die in winter in a far northern place is to become a storage problem. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fantasia Johnson, Lawyer Peterbuoy, Belknap Bleu, Don's Grocery, Antoine de Plupart, Elsie Feuilleloop, John Scratching Water, Stephen King, Hunellia Faulk Ponus Park, Bud's Bar, Main Street, Ogden Factsampler
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