Small family with rooster: Stories [Hardcover]

Daniel Asa Rose (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These 20 short stories are by turns comic, tender, sad, raunchy and moving. Rose, whose first novel Flipping for It garnered praise last year, can toss off delectable slices-of-life, like "Envy the Dead," in which a bored-to-tears Air Force wife lures a random phone-caller into an afternoon rendezvous. He is equally adept at subtly analyzing the unspoken tensions that tear couples apart or glue them together. Many of his unpredictable characters are driven to desperation: a Danish mountain climber in South Africa stumbles upon a couple making love and realizes that he misses his wife; a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn turns to a black prostitute in California while searching for his son who has been kidnapped by his estranged wife. Frequently, a powerful image crystallizes the story's emotional impact; in "About the Sea," a neurologist raging helplessly over his son, paralyzed in an accident, holds a defensive college dean responsible and dreams that the man is drowning. Finely crafted and freshly imagined, these insightful tales linger in the mind.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this collection of stories, many published here for the first time, Rose creates a vital, if slightly skewed, series of landscapes that add up to a powerfuland distinctly "Eighties"view of American life. His characters, ranging from college lovers to upper-class suburbanites to a timid assistant curator who goes wild in a purple thunderstorm, are skillfully constructed and reverberate with a peculiar energy. Rose's attention to detailto a walk or a gestureadds to the particularized realism of his stories; they seem to depict a microcosm of today's world, with its alienation, loneliness, and gaping holes in the fabric of communication. This starkness is unsettlingbut the discomfort comes from witnessing situation, characters, and products of a world that we all, as readers, recognize. Jessica Grim, NYPL
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 227 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312018266
• ISBN-13: 978-0312018269
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,817,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

UPDATE! "LARRY'S KIDNEY" has been listed as one of the TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR by Publishers Weekly, and has been optioned to be a major motion picture. Since the summer, Daniel has appeared on NPR, CNN, The New York Times Op Ed Page, and over 35 radio programs. In addition, he has read from the book in Albuquerque, Boston, New York, Detroit, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Portland (Oregon), Saint Louis, and Providence. Thanks to all who turned out!

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DANIEL ASA ROSE is the author, most recently, of the world's first (dark) comedy about medical tourism. "LARRY'S KIDNEY: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With my Black Sheep Cousin and his Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant ... and Save His Life" (Morrow, ISBN 978-0061708701) is being called "a satisfying, hysterical page-turner that will captivate fans of travel writing and family narratives, with special interest for anyone who's helped a love one through serious illness" (Publishers Weekly starred review); "a side-splitting tour de force that will resonate with readers concerned about the plight of American patients who may be relegated for years to an organ transplant waiting list" (Library Journal); "skillful, funny, fascinating" (The New York Observer); and "one of the funniest, most touching and bizarre nonfiction books I've read. A remarkably talented writer and a great book" (Boston Globe).

An NEA Literary Fellow and father of four boys, Daniel was born in New York City and graduated from Brown University, which awarded him an honorary Phi Beta Kappa. His first short story was accepted by The New Yorker when he was 27 and he won an O. Henry Prize and two Pen Fiction Awards for the other stories in his first collection, "SMALL FAMILY WITH ROOSTER." His first novel, "FLIPPING FOR IT," a black comedy about divorce from the man's point of view, was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Paperback. In 2002 he published "HIDING PLACES: A Father and his Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape From the Holocaust" - a saga that intermingles a taut current-day search for the hiding places that saved his family in World War II with memories of the author's own hiding places growing up in WASP 1950s Connecticut - a book which earned starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly ("brilliant") and Kirkus ("remarkable"), as well as the New England Booksellers Discovery Award, a coveted place on the BookSense 76 List, and inclusion in "Best Jewish Writing 2003."

Currently an editor of the international literary magazine THE READING ROOM, he has served as arts & culture editor of the Forward newspaper, travel columnist for Esquire magazine, humor writer for GQ, essayist for The New York Times Magazine, book reviewer for The New York Observer and New York Magazine, and food critic for the past 20 pounds.