| ||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Vintage Contemporaries) by Karen Russell |
by Elizabeth McCracken
|
by Aimee Bender
|
by Edwidge Danticat
|
by Miranda July
|
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Francine ProseReading Scott Snyder's accomplished first story collection, Voodoo Heart, is a little like watching a magician pull rabbits out of a hat. No matter how many times you've seen the trick performed, you still marvel that someone has figured out not only how to do it but, more important, how to persuade the audience that no one has ever done it exactly that way before. Snyder's particular sleight of hand enables him to make the unlikely seem disturbingly familiar; he bends and stretches the laws of ordinary causality just enough so that, when his narratives snap back, there's a twang that reverberates after the final line. His protagonists are young romantics worried about the conflict between authenticity and adventurousness, torn between a self-protective longing for solitude and a longing for some deeper loyalty to another human being. What they mistake for life-changing passion may turn out to be simple—and terrible—misunderstanding, and a chance encounter may initiate a chain of events that will alter them forever. Many reside just outside odd or intentional communities (a boot camp for troubled teens, a summer haven for overweight kids) in which they take an almost anthropological interest. Others are in transit or in flight, reluctant to confront that what looked like a whimsical job opportunity or a brief vacation from ordinary life may in fact be a permanent dead end.In the title story, a young couple renovates an abandoned Florida mansion that borders on a women's prison—a proximity that intensifies the hero's most secret and desperate concerns about his true nature. In another tale, an equally conflicted young man meets a celebrity convalescing from drastic plastic surgery and becomes involved in a meteoric affair that flames out as her recovery changes his sense of what it means to be injured. In "Dumpster Tuesday," a guy who seems to have everything (or just enough) loses it all when his girlfriend leaves him for a brain-damaged, improbably charismatic country singer, and in "About Face," a trumpet player working at a juvenile detention center learns a painful lesson about illness, compassion and the mysteries of sex.Suffused with sly humor, sympathy and high spirits, the stories in Voodoo Heart are giddy with the thrill of discovering what can be done with words, what you can make happen on the page. The result is as irreducible and rewarding as making playing cards disappear or pulling gold coins out of thin air.Francine Prose's most recent book is Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her new book, Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them will be published in the fall.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Snyder's delightfully deranged world contains characters living a circuslike existence. Crammed with acrobatic imaginings, the stories in this collection blur the line between the absurd and the profane. In one tale, a young man mistakenly crashes his two-seater plane into a farmhouse wedding and takes off with the bride; in another a loner captures the affection of a famous star whose face is a mass of bruises and cuts. "Blue Yodel" follows a bereft Niagara Falls "jumper" watch guard in hot pursuit of his fiancee, who has taken off in a blimp across the vast middle states. In "Happy Fish plus Coin," a trust-fund runaway meets an inspirational speaker who, like a cat with nine lives, keeps surviving horrendous accidents. Blimps, walkie-talkies, and metal detectors take on whimsical yet potent meaning. The dialogue is snappy, the characters sharp, and the story lines consuming, offering, at every turn, a new twist from the predictable, not unlike that of The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004). Snyder is masterful, and the fact that he draws on uniquely American symbols, stories, and songs makes Voodoo Heart outstanding and unusual, and a spectacular debut. Emily Cook
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
› Visit Amazon's Scott Snyder Page
› Visit Amazon's Scott Snyder Page
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
(learn more)
blue yodel, plus coin Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Voodoo Heart, Dumpster Tuesday, Dick Doyle, Happy Fish Plus Coin, Captain Marvel, Sergeant Brill, Sergeant Fergus, New York, Rose Deach, Pipe Island, Sweet Fizz, Silver Coach, Glens Creek Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
blue yodel, plus coin Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Voodoo Heart, Dumpster Tuesday, Dick Doyle, Happy Fish Plus Coin, Captain Marvel, Sergeant Brill, Sergeant Fergus, New York, Rose Deach, Pipe Island, Sweet Fizz, Silver Coach, Glens Creek Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
95% buy the item featured on this page: Voodoo Heart $10.40 |
 |
2% buy Voodoo Season $11.90 |
 |
2% buy Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry: Stories $11.86 |
 |
1% buy St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Vintage Contemporaries) $11.16 |
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Look for Similar Items by Category
Look for Similar Items by Subject
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
