From Publishers Weekly
The 35 stories in this exciting collection dramatize electrifying encounters and characters seized by heightened emotions, revealing them with inventiveness and boundless stylistic variety. Many of the stories are little more than brief vignettes, yet each illuminates its protagonist's state of mind like a flash of lightning. Demented voices in monologue animate the succinct "Lethal," where a sexual terrorist begins, "I just want to touch you a little"; and "Area Man Found Crucified," in which a wounded war veteran, now a vagrant, pleads for death. "Beauty Salon" maps the painful, delicate meeting of a convalescing man and the beautiful woman who barbers him. Women are fatal victims of male violence in "Turquoise" and "Murder." In "Bare Legs," a willful prostitute hunts for her children and sleeps with truckers; in "The Date," a woman changes clothes in a public lavatory, "panting like a dog" as she prepares to couple with yet another man. The tireless Oates ( Black Water ) seems determined to test her technical skills: several tales read like polished exercises. "Running" is chiefly a single sentence (over six pages) that mimes the headlong tempo of a runner as she pumps and ponders. "Forgive Me" and "Letter, Lover" stretch the epistolary mode: in the one, a woman inscribes the same letter to two former lovers, unable to keep them apart in her mind, in the other, obscenely sinister missives open the door to a new relationship. Oates is evidently willing to go anywhere her imagination leads her, and this collection adds several striking pieces to her already wide body of work about threatening situations.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Fragments of whispered lust and longing fade in and out like voices on a shortwave radio in Oates' newest collection of stories, most published previously (Michigan Quarterly, Omni, The Massachusetts Review, etc.) and some less than a page long. The result is a book whose cumulative effect proves more riveting than its parts as Oates, in typical fashion, cuts to the essential emotion and lets the details fall to the side. In ``Angry,'' a young man conceives a passion for a woman he observes speaking to a lover in anger; in ``From the Life Of...,'' a world-weary writer mechanically seduces a harpist in an anonymous hotel; in ``Shot,'' a young girl fails to rescue an abused pet dog chained up on the wrong side of town; and in ``Love, Forever,'' a woman murders her children after she's rejected by the man she loves. What proves most striking about each of these tales is the enormous amount of drama, sensation, and psychological insight Oates manages to convey in very few pages. While the briefest among the 34 remain too fragmentary to be engaging, it takes only two or three pages for Oates's prose to reach a captivating energy: as in the leisurely, wistful meditations of those close to death (the writer in ``From the Life Of...''; a hairdresser's elderly client in ``Beauty Salon''), and in the accounts of haunting, frightening encounters with strangers (``Running''; ``Where Is Here?''). Throughout, Oates confidently experiments with content and style, breaking rules whenever she feels like it. Overall: an enthralling, varied, and fascinating collection. --
Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
