The Store of a Million Items [Paperback]

Michelle Cliff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1998

As Marge Piercy said of an earlier collection by this acclaimed Caribbean-American writer: "Michelle Cliff has come into her full powers in fiction . . .These quietly written voices seize the reader's imagination with a gentle, remorseless grip that does not weaken." With a precise economy of language and unsentimental intelligence, Cliff's new stories show people confronting the central dualities of a complex world: black and white, colonialism and revolution, America and the Third World, femininity and masculinity. In Tillie Olsen's words, "Cliff is rare, and is already distinguished as a writer of great substance and power." A MARINER PAPERBACK ORIGINAL.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The Store of a Million Items, Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff writes about a childhood spent on two islands--Jamaica and Manhattan. Cliff examines the gaps between cultures, genders, and generations in each of these 11 succinct, lyrical tales. These stories contrast the abundance and racism of America during the 1950s and 1960s with life in Jamaica during the same period. In the title story, the narrator describes how the arrival of new products at the Store of a Million Items marked the changes of seasons for children in her New York neighborhood. Instead of spring, summer, winter, and fall, they had yo-yo season, water-gun season, and flexible-flyer season. In that story and in "Down the Shore," the author adeptly describes the secret worlds children inhabit. In "Contagious Melancholia" and "Stan's Speed Shop," Cliff examines people who are just plain different. "Stan's Speed Shop" is about an encounter between a crazy but harmless rich white man and a young black girl, who reflects that her family is packed with odd characters whose eccentricities are a product of their difficult lives: "We originated in the place where the sun never set and the blood never dried. Fragility was almost a point of honor, evidence of our delicacy against cruelty. Whatever happened, we weren't to blame, nor were we to make any change." Michelle Cliff's stories are not packed with action and plot, but they are full of fascinating, disappointed people and are told from a perspective that is both insightful and political. --Jill Marquis

From Booklist

Sparse and lyrical, this collection of short stories reflects Cliff's Caribbean American heritage, providing cutting insights into two cultures. The simple island life has complex undercurrents--pained relationships between men and women, disappointments in life. Cliff shows oppression in paradise, the oppression of everyone having something to say, the wilting comments, a lack of privacy in a place where it is not surprising to run across people who are "dead stamp" in their resemblance to you. Her portraits of life in the U.S. are no less cutting, revealing alienation and small cultural frictions that leave wide gaps. A recurring theme throughout the collection is the disturbing news that reached the islands and permeated black consciousness in the U.S., namely, the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Cliff's economy of words conveys the heftiness of human relations, male and female, black and white. Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Paperback: 115 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Soft Cover edition (May 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395901294
• ISBN-13: 978-0395901298
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,394,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and is the author of two previous novels, No Telephone to Heaven and Abeng; a collection of short stories, and two poetry collections. Her fiction, poetry, and esays have appeared in numerous publications, including Parnassus and the VLS.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful! Highly recommended., August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Store of a Million Items (Paperback)

In this spare, lean collection of stories Michelle Cliff says more than books three times the size of The Store of a Million Items. Fans of Cliff from novels like Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven will not be disappointed. Especially haunting is Cliff's use of the recurring theme of Emmett Till's murder, which has reverberations not only in the U.S. but throughout the world, impacting even those stories of Cliff's that take place in remote third world areas. Despite the harshness and violence in some of these stories, The Store of a Million Items is a book of great beauty.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting insights to two cultures, January 7, 2001

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Store of a Million Items (Paperback)

In one of these stories, Cliff identifies the tellers of oral stories in Jamaica as her first writing instructors. This observation, although in a piece of fiction, is substantiated by the sense of plot in these stories. While the grammar and syntax of the stories is literary, the plot is that of sharing over a cup of coffee. Within this context, the stories are excellent.

Transactions tells of a salesman who wants children while his wife does not. He buys a small child he found in the roadway. His ruminations on how to get his wife to accept the child and his care for the child's need explore marital expections and prejudices based on gradations of skin color.

Monster tells of the narrator's relationship with her father and grandmother (his mother-in-law) in the context of movies, especially in the showing of Frankenstein in grandmother's house.

Rubicon is the story of regulars at a bar, especially a young girl waiting while her mother carries on an affiar.

A Public Woman is a reflection on the death of a prostitute in the "Wild West".

The stories geographical cover a wide area - Jamaica, France, New York, California. In each case, it is the gap between the community ideal of perfection vs. reality that propells the story forward. In Art History, the instability of the boss with regards to her son; in Wartime, the gap between hero and drunk combining with the new - a military surgeon with dark skin ...

There are a few times when the author expects detailed knowledge of her time period that the reader may not share. Outside this minor flaw, the stories succeed in showing the clash between cultures - economic elitism, racism, diverse interpretations of similar events, etc.