Scar Vegas: And Other Stories [Hardcover]

Tom Paine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2000

With explosive narrative skill, Tom Paine pulls you into the worlds of a cross-dressing Army general, a confused lowlife being offered an incredible opportunity, and a despairing man whose mother hates him for no reason. Paine's stories feature exotic locales and take you on adventures you never imagined. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Playboy, Harper's, and Zoetrope and has received O. Henry awards, prizes from the Boston Review and Pushcart, and a National Magazine award, and has been optioned for film productions. Like Ernest Hemingway, Robert Stone, Richard Ford, and Russell Banks, Tom Paine grips the reader with his passion and vision.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An urban legend making the rounds goes something like this: a guy accepts a drink from a good-looking woman in an airport bar and, three hours later, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney. This apocryphal tale of involuntary black-market organ donors figures in the title story of Tom Paine's debut collection, Scar Vegas. But though a purloined kidney provides a twist, Paine has already delivered the knock-out punch much earlier as he catalogs the black comedy of errors dogging the marriage of Janey "Fruit" Loop to semipro football player Breezy Bonaventure. At the center of the nuptial confusion is Johnny Loop, ex-con brother of the bride and the tale's narrator: "We are the Loops. Someone sure as hell is Fruit if you are the Loops." As he negotiates his sister's beer-guzzling fiancé and the fiancé's belligerent teammates, Johnny maintains his sang-froid: "I ain't never surprised. This world ain't never sprung nothing on me. Some people get themselves hit by lightning and other strange things but that ain't me at all." By the time Johnny discovers, in fact, that that is him, Paine has already led his character and readers on so vividly surreal a tour of the Loser's Las Vegas that the ending seems less a surprise than the only possible conclusion to such an adventure.

But the weirdness and pathos in "Scar Vegas" pales in comparison to what Paine gives us in "General Markman's Last Stand" in which a Marine Corps officer long idolized by his men faces his greatest challenge yet: his retirement party. Suffice it to say there's more to Markman than meets the eye. And in "Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?" the author hits home with an agonizing encounter between a wealthy, shipwrecked American and the boatload of Haitian refugees who rescue him. Each of the 10 stories in this collection is larger than life--not for this writer carefully understated dissections of personal relationships or quiet domestic drama. Instead Paine gives us white slavers, Romanian brothers on a road trip to Reno, Myanmar witch doctors, and delegates to an Anarchist convention. The voices are fresh, the stories unflinchingly true to themselves; Scar Vegas is as compelling as it is edgy. --Sheila Bright

From Publishers Weekly

A striking panoply of voices and settings that nevertheless emanate from a singular, daring conscience, this gathering of 10 tales from O. Henry and Pushcart Prize-author Paine reveals an abiding concern for the subjugated spirit's slim hopes for subverting oppressive social or political regimes. In "General Markman's Last Stand," a Marine hero endures the violent reverence of his enlistees as he bravely moves toward certain humiliation on his last day of service. Paine visits disparate lands and contorts countless dialects in his focus on the menace of colonization . One tale, set in a Myanmar tavern, concerns a hotel real estate developer's anecdote about razing a pristine Balinese forest. Another assumes the voice of a 16-year-old Providence, R.I., skateboard punk on his way to the '96 Portland Anarchist Convention ("Nobody is really clear on when the Anarchist Convention is going to start...") with some strained but affecting present-tense colloquy. Paine's rendering of the rhythms of Eastern European speech and political sentiment is particularly poignant and sharp in the excellent "Ceausescu's Cat," where Romanian twin brothersAone a poet, one a thiefAbridle against oppression in their divergent ways. But warning also comes in the form of the comeuppance tale. In "Will You Say Something, Monsieur Eliot?" and the equally savage "A Predictable Nightmare on the Eve of the Stock Market Breaking 6,000," a conquering, strutting executive is forced to face mortal physical danger and personal despair. Paine is concerned with institutional and political arrogance and ignorance, and with the meek, inarticulate travelers shuffling along the peripheries of the callous states erected by the ruling minority. He is everywhere updating the "superfluous man" (part Melville, part Conrad, part Mailer even): misshapen, ungraceful men and women groping for a clue of divinity manifest in the form of even a qualified liberty. In spare, seasoned prose, Paine portrays this invisible, searching majority and honors their often doomed hopes with the dignity they seek. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151004897
• ISBN-13: 978-0151004898
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,654,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tom Paine, where have you been all my life?, January 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Scar Vegas: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

I can't believe it. Just as I thought I could never find a short story with something important to say, Tom Paine erupts with stories that grab your attention and make you think. Great writing. Important ideas.Unforgettable. If you suspect that there's more to real life than internet IPO's and instant millionaires, read Scar Vegas. A breath of real air--fresh and shocking.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The variety of stories is breathtaking., May 5, 2000

By 

P. Meltzer (Wynnewood, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Scar Vegas: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

In truth, if half stars were available, I might have given this collection of short stories 4 1/2 stars, but I still though it was great. The stories were varied not only in their subject matter but in their style of being told, almost to the point where it feels that each story was written by a completely different author. In addition, they range from broad comedy to real tragedy to astute social commentary to everything in between. Quite an accomplishment. My only slight reservation was that, while I considered the second 5 stories to be very good, they were not in my view as uniformly excellent as the first five, which were truly great. In particular, I felt that the "Unapproved Minutes of the Carthage, Vermont, Zoning Board" (absolutely hilarious) and "The Spoon Children" were the best of the group. Buy the book and enjoy it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best of new short stories, April 24, 2000

By 

Richard B. (West Coast) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scar Vegas: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

This is an excellent collection of edgy and exquisitely detailed stories. All the tales have twists, which comment on the modern landscape. The writer has won a host of awards and his sumptuous and effecting prose produce thrills as well as introspection with regard to political events and corporate policy. Highly entertaining and recommended.