Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame [Hardcover]

Janet Frame (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2009

The most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame's stories ever published, this exceptional collection has been chosen from the four different volumes released during her lifetime. Featuring the best of her stories, the book includes pieces that were written over four decades, including stories from her debut collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories. First published in 1951, those stories were written while Frame was confined in a mental hospital. When the collection won the Hubert Church Award, a threatened brain operation (akin to a lobotomy) was averted.

The stories in this new book also include selections from You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, published in the 1980s after a hiatus from writing. The last stories she published before her death, her writings from this time reveal Frame's unflinching ability to explore the drama of madness, isolation, and identity.

This new book also includes five short stories that have not been collected before, completing a volume that testifies to the brilliance of Janet Frame's life and literary talent.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

How larky Frame’s stories of childhood in New Zealand seem at the outset. Nature is a realm of sensuous pleasure, liberation from the self and others, risks worth taking, and infinite mystery. Frame’s language lilts and loops like nursery rhymes, and, like those old, loaded songs, is weighted with a deadly undertow. “See the lagoon,” a grandmother says repeatedly to the narrator in the title story of Frame’s first collection, The Lagoon (1951), a directive with chilling allusions. That indelible tale launches this superlative posthumous gathering of selected stories (following Frame’s heretofore unpublished novel Towards Another Summer, 2009) drawn from Frame’s four collections and including five uncollected tales. Whether she’s writing about the wild, the magic of movies, a man obsessed with electricity, or the decision to stop absorbing news of the world, Frame is mythic, slyly funny, and psychologically dead-on. And just as wryly critical of herself as of others, most astringently in “Prizes,” a tale about the intrusiveness of success. Laced with startling observations and leaps of the imagination, Frame’s gracefully excoriating stories are iridescently alive. --Donna Seaman

Review

"New Zealander Frame, the multiple-award-winning novelist, short story writer, and poet, is as famous for her epic personal history as for her career. Her first collection, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", published in 1954, was written while Frame stayed in a mental hospital. This new anthology spans her lifetime and includes the best of four published collections"The Lagoon and Other Stories, Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies, The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches", and "You Are Now Entering the Human Heart"plus five previously unpublished stories. Often melancholy but containing wonderful detail, imagery, and emotion, her works cover a wide range of topics like childhood, madness, relationships, identity, and more. Many of the stories are two-page shorts, a testament to Frame's skill in concision and economy of language. VERDICT Highly recommended for poets and short story enthusiasts, this collection may be particularly appealing to writers who have struggled professionally, as they may identify with some of the characters." —Library Journal

"Janet Frame proves the master of nostalgia, beauty, and loss. Frame is, and will remain, divine." —Alice Sebold

"Quite simply, she's a stunning writer." —Dominion Post (New Zealand)

"A poetic soul has rarely come better disguised." —Jane Campion

Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (December 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582435154
• ISBN-13: 978-1582435152
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,344,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For completeists only, April 1, 2010

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ExPat "ExPat" (NZ/UK/US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame (Hardcover)

A posthumous collection of Frame's short stories, the vast majority previously published. While there are some stand out pieces, the collection as a whole pales in comparison to her fictions.