Amazon.com: River Street: A Novella and Stories (9780870743733): Phil Condon: Books

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Condon drew on his experiences as a landscaper, firefighter, cabdriver, slaughterhouse worker, office clerk, delivery truck driver and bricklayer to find the inspiration for this novella and short stories. The eponymous novella, a grim story about a drifter driven to murder, is the real gem here, but unfortunately readers will have to wade through the uneven collection to get to it. The stories deal with disenchanted, down-on-their-luck characters, from the grieving son remembering his absent father in "Starkweather" and Madeline whose breast surgery serves as a symbol of disappointments of all kinds ("Seven") to Raymond and Natalie ("The Velvet Shelf"), whose love affair ends the day their puppy is killed by a passing car. In "The Emptyheart Boy," Michael is haunted by his failed marriage and the country place he was forced to abandon. Yet he can't seem to come to terms with his present relationship with Kathryn or his new life in a run-down apartment building, and in his apathy, even the death of an old friend barely moves him. The stories are sad and believable, but they meander to abrupt and imperfect endings as if Condon, having mastered the art of character development, was still bewildered by plots. The reader looking for inspiration or beauty will not find them in this collection, but the characters and their struggles merit a second look.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Condon has been recognized as a comer for some time. His short fiction, which first appeared in publications like Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and Long Story, has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he was awarded a 1993 NEA Fellowship. River Street, his first book, takes its name from the novella that closes the collection, a grim, violent tale of a drifter pushed over the line when he slips off a freight train in a Montana mountain town. The landscape of all these collected tales is lonely country, whether the narrator is remembering Omaha, Nebraska, in the late 1950s in "Starkweather's Eyes," hitchhiking to New York City on the interstate in "Walt and Dixie," or riding on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited from Boston to Chicago in "Seven." Lost souls searching for shelter, often in all the wrong places, Condon's characters are vivid, troubled human beings with whom readers will identify, sometimes in spite of themselves. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Phil Condon Page

Phil Condon's books are River Street (stories, SMU Press, Dallas, 1994); Clay Center (novel, EWU Press, Spokane, 2004, recipient of the Novel Award from the Faulkner Society of New Orleans); Montana Surround: Land, Water, Nature, and Place (essays, Johnson Books, Boulder CO, 2004); and most recently, Nine Ten Again, stories, (recipient of the 2008 Elixir Press Fiction Award in Denver).

His stories and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Northern Lights, The Black Warrior Review, High Desert Journal, Epoch, Manoa, and many other journals. He received an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, led a writing residency for the National Writers' Voice, taught fiction and nonfiction writing in the Spaulding University MFA program (Louisville), and received the A.B. Guthrie Short Fiction Award at CutBank. Throughout the 1990's he taught composition, fiction, and nonfiction writing at the University of Montana.

Born in Cheyenne and raised in Omaha, Phil Condon attended Pomona College for one year in the 1960's. Subsequently, he lived in California, British Columbia, Missouri, and since 1987, in Missoula, Montana. Before returning to college as a 37-year-old sophomore, he worked as a union bricklayer for ten years and lived without electricity for five years on the Niangua River in the Missouri Ozarks. His academic education includes a BA in Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction, and an MS in Environmental Studies/Writing. He currently teaches Environmental Writing and Literature to undergraduate and graduate students as an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana.