Allegiance de Gurney Norman

Allegiance: Stories

Gurney Norman

A new collection of stories from celebrated Kentucky author Gurney Norman “A beautiful book” … “A remarkable, eye-opening set of stories” … “Brilliantly arranged” … “An exhilarating mirroring of consciousness itself” … “Grand and important, funny and heartbreaking” … “An act of grace” Allegiance is a brilliant and original set of stories by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman. Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream-of-consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life. Each story builds on what has come before, “prisms enlarging the effect of the whole …” The stories are humorous and heartbreaking, told mainly in the voice of Norman’s fictional narrator, Wilgus Collier. From his working-class childhood in the coalfields of Appalachia to the center of the 1960s counterculture and back again to Kentucky, Norman’s journey has been a life of many movements. This is a jacketed hardcover edition of Allegiance, featuring a foreword by poet Leatha Kendrick, an author’s note, and an original cover painting by Appalachian artist Pam Oldfield Meade. A selection of nonfiction pieces comprises the book’s epilogue. Published by Old Cove Press

Citește tot Restrânge

Recenzii

“For many people, ‘Allegiance’ is a noun, but in Gurney Norman’s hands, it is a verb—an active verb, an earthshaking process that rearranges the expectations of a homeplace, raises the windows of personal and epic history, and throws open doors of memory and imagination. Allegiance is a remarkable, eye-opening set of stories that affirm and defy time and place. It’s larger than one lifetime, resonating across generations, and inviting readers to reconsider their own allegiances.”—Sandra L. Ballard, Editor, Appalachian Journal

“We seldom find a book that we have hoped for like this one. These bright and humorous, sometimes sad yet always telling stories are both lyrical and dramatic; (Norman’s) sharpness of detail and flexibility of styles and tones remains central in his rich Appalachian world…. A blessing by a veteran author."—Larry Smith, New York Journal of Books

“The highest achievement of Allegiance may be its reframing of the experience of loss.... It’s a difficult task, pulled off with savvy authorial choice and seamless prose.... Composed with a wise hand for structural shape, the vignettes transcend timelines, vacillate between first and third person, travel from childhood to adulthood and back.... The result is an exhilarating mirroring of consciousness itself, a design that is more stunning natural element than manufactured arc.”—KAYLA WHITAKER, author of The Animators
“We pledge our allegiance in elementary school, and then we forget. Unless as adults we come back to the idea of allegiance, and if we do, we understand that any such commitment is bound by the power of love. Gurney Norman opens this collection with a pledge—to those gone before and those who come after, to the hills and hollers and hellbenders that make us, and to faith in the seed. The journey, here, is grand and important, funny and heartbreaking. This is a beautiful book, a ‘shattered jewel’ that refracts the light and delivers the hope and discovery of ‘sweet apples even in the wreckage.’”—JIM MINICK, author of Fire Is Your Water
“In 1977, Gurney Norman published a slim volume titled Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, ten soft-spoken but exquisitely crafted short stories that encompass the childhood and coming-of-age of Wilgus Collier, a young native son of Appalachia. The modest collection soon found an attentive audience; it has quietly accumulated thousands of admirers, and has never been out of print.
"Allegiance is the long-anticipated continuation of those stories. Novelistic in breadth and scope and gravity, Allegiance harkens back once more to Wilgus’s Appalachian boyhood, and traces his life deep into an adult career as publisher/editor of his hometown weekly newspaper.
"In the course of three dozen stories—several of them small masterpieces in their own right—Wilgus bears painful witness to the long, slow, inexorable disintegration of his family, the decline and desolation of his beloved mountain homeland, and his own parallel descent into alcoholism and depression.
"Yet for all their melancholy properties, the stories are replete with sly good humor and vast generosity of spirit. In a rich admixture of memory and imagination, fiction and nonfiction, delivered in prose as clear and pure and beguiling as mountain music, Gurney Norman pays homage to his place and its people. This book is an act of grace.”—ED McCLANAHAN, author of Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever
“These stories are more personal and more revealing for those of us who have enjoyed hearing Gurney Norman tell stories or who have read his books over the last few decades. At the same time, they are bound to be fascinating to those who have never ever even read or heard a Gurney Norman story.”—Appalachian Mountain Books

Notă biografică

Gurney Norman is a novelist and short story writer whose works include Divine Right’s Trip, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories,Ancient Creek: A Folktale, and Allegiance. He is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky and a former Kentucky Poet Laureate. A native of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, he was the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Norman has received many honors for his work and is a widely known Appalachian literary and cultural advocate. He is coeditor of Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes, and An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature.

Descriere

Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream of consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life.

Allegiance: Stories

Preț: 107^.02 lei

Carte disponibilă

Specificații

Recenzii

Notă biografică

Descriere

Papetărie, jocuri, reviste

Allegiance: Stories

Preț: 107.02 lei

Specificații

Recenzii

Notă biografică

Descriere

Preț: 107^.02 lei