Fifteen stories, at once playful and serious, simple and layered, familiar and not. Gertrude Stein and Buffy the Vampire Slayer track down the bridal party to save a Las Vegas wedding. An ambivalent geneticist disappears himself in Texas scrub country. A five-year-old in search of her lost mother walks a high-wire between her home and her lesbian neighbor's. These are stories about people yearning for connection with each other, with themselves, with whatever lies beyond.
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Ron MacLean's fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Prism International, Night Train and other quarterlies. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a Pushcart Prize nominee, and author of the novel Blue Winnetka Skies. Why the Long Face, a collection of stories, will be published in fall 2008.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing book--short story writing at its best,
By
This review is from: Why the Long Face? (Paperback)
From the very first page of Ron's fantastic collection, you know you've stumbled into a strange world. This is a book where people open museums devoted to toast, do art projects involving meat, walk on high wires between apartment windows. Who wouldn't want to be transported to a place where such fantastic things happen? I loved this book for many reasons, but especially for Ron's beautiful language and the spare, haunting imagery in his prose. This is a book where you want to underline all the sentences you particularly like, then realize there wouldn't be much left un-underlined! If you like contemporary fiction, especially with an experimental bent, do yourself a favor and buy this book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The ultimate road trip for readers,
By
This review is from: Why the Long Face? (Paperback)
The fifteen stories in Ron MacLean's superb collection examine life through a variety of prisms. In some stories, the constraints of the physical world are heightened or tweaked, while others evoke the altered reality associated with dreams. What remains consistent throughout these stories is MacLean's ability to create compelling and sympathetic characters. From the grief-stricken father and daughter in the moving "Aerialist" to the troubled couples in "South of Why," MacLean's characters are driven by loss, and by their yearning for escape. Maps and geography figure prominently in many of these stories, and the experience of reading them is similar to that of taking a road trip: the reader turns the page with breathless anticipation, wondering what might be lurking beyond the next mile marker, and reaches the end of the road having learned as much about herself as she learned from the characters encountered along the way.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I've already bought this for three friends.,
By jennifer (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Why the Long Face? (Paperback)
I find myself throwing this book into my bag to carry with me, reading short excerpts aloud to others... Each story inhabits its own quirky world, peopled by characters who seem familiar and slightly bizarre, as if we could suddenly see inside the couple who lives two doors down. The real gift in these stories is that they are entertaining and yet deeply serious. Buried among the pages are deep truths about life, grace, silence and relationships that made me stop reading, mark the page, close the book, and simply dwell within a phrase.
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