This shockingly intense collection of eleven stories rips open the fragile shells of women's relationships and the precarious ties that shape them.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
"We are all homeless women, crash victims, chance survivors," Kate Braverman announces in her lush, atmospheric collection of short fiction, Small Craft Warnings. Or, put another way, "Sometimes women must go traveling." The disassociated protagonists of these stories are travelers of a psychic if not a physical sort, homeless women by nature if not in fact. Living through the long, bright California of the soul, they find themselves seduced by the possibilities of simply walking away. An aging soap-opera star struggles to cope with her brain-damaged mother in "Our Lady of 43 Sorrows"; the teenager of "Hour of the Fathers" chafes at her visits to her newfound father, a disabled, mentally ill Vietnam vet. Oddly passive, these women dream of escape, not action. Even when the young homeless mother in "Pagan Night" plans to abandon her baby, it's as if she were reading about something that had already happened.
Braverman's prose is something of an acquired taste. An accomplished poet, she writes in highly rhythmic and figurative language, in metaphors that shimmy from concrete to abstract and back again in a way that can be disorienting, even claustrophobic. Why use one noun when three in a series will do? Mesh; aviaries; the odors of citrus and vanilla; porcelain teacups; candles, perfume, and blood: these are the incantations in Braverman's curious fictional spell. "Sin becomes a kind of flame, a blue friend warm in your hand," proclaims the grandmother in the title story, and if this sort of dialogue strikes you as contrived rather than lyrical, Small Craft Warnings may not be for you. For the less literal-minded, Braverman rewards the reader's attention with linguistic pyrotechnics that read like no one else writing fiction today. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
The women depicted in poet (Postcard from August) and novelist (Wonders of the West) Braverman's unremarkable new collection have fallen out of love with the self-destruction that marked her characters' lives in previous work. Underneath the seemingly tidy existences of her female characters, whether teenaged or middle-aged, lies (still) a host of precarious fragilities, though the women have moved beyond recovery from substance abuse and are often groping for freedom from within freighted relationships with grandmothers and mothers. In the title story, for example, the 13-year-old narrator learns on a visit to her ailing grandmother to defy death. " 'What if one life isn't enough?' " her grandmother suggests. " 'What if three dimensions aren't right?' " As Cassidy O'Shea, an aging soap-opera actress in "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows," manages her brain-damaged mother's life, she recognizes that the older woman no longer has to deal with "failed marriages, abandonments, or lies"?a fact that makes Cassidy's mother "the happiest woman she knew." Like the California landscape that her characters inhabit, Braverman's prose is densely layered. Each moment is charged with significance; however, the inevitable epiphanies that her characters undergo seem labored, and the generalizations that these imply too often verge on the banal. Braverman's characters have healed themselves of the maladies that made them distinctive; perhaps as a result her writing seems sadly to lack its former urgency.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thomas Wolfe Meets Bob Dylan,
By Paul Saevig, PAULESAEVIG@AOL.COM (Santa Ana, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature Series) (Paperback)
Kate Braverman's ingenious writing shouts and sings a high skill at poesy and narrative. I think many of her readers are attracted primarily to her imagery and metaphors. There is a sameness at the center of her stories -- illness, death, putrefaction, decline. These brilliant stories follow the trend, and Braverman leans toward epic prose poems. Her characters are memorable in one way, similar in another. What I admore most about her is her intensely evocative setting in LA, proving once more that place can pass for story. If you love clean, spare writing with a strong narrative element and distinctive characters developing new and original themes, these stories are not for you. But if you want gorgeous poems set to prose, gobble it up.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
philosophy,
By A Customer
This review is from: Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature Series) (Paperback)
What a remarkable collection. Its really a meditation on existence. This is a museum of life in all its sadness and beauty.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
rich, lush, poetic short stories,
By A Customer
This review is from: Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature Series) (Paperback)
My favorite type of prose are written by poets. Reading Kate Braverman is like filling on a rich desert. I am reminded of Jeanette Winterson and Arhundati Roy. It is hard to find such deeply poetic prose today. This is not a grocery store paperback--it requires slow reading and it is worth every minute. It is a feast of words and images and ideas.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
