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When: Stories de Katherine Zlabek

When: Stories: The Journal Non/Fiction Prize

Autor Katherine Zlabek
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 29 sep 2019
A bull’s heart simmers in a crockpot, echoing the household’s tension in a retelling of Biblical Jacob’s trials. A priest observes his congregation’s descent into madness and wonders at his own role. An elderly woman imagines herself into her boomtown’s history and eventual abandonment at the height of the Gold Rush. Towns and people vanish, daughters return, women prepare escapes, and animals invade. In this collection of stories situated within the mythology of the Midwest, the past is always present, tangible and unrelenting, constantly asking these characters whether they will be a sacrifice or a martyr, daring them to give in without a fight. Here, transcendence is a tonic hard-earned by the battered soul.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
 
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780814255469
ISBN-10: 0814255469
Pagini: 156
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.24 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Non/Fiction Prize

Recenzii

“In these lovely, compelling stories, the Midwest is a place both plain and fantastical. Seen through the dreamy, even hallucinatory, vision of Katherine Zlabek’s characters, traffic accidents and church fundraisers—the stuff of daily life—become magical, ominous, tragic. This is a writer with a singular, beautifully strange vision.”—Leah Stewart

“Katherine Zlabek is a writer with an honest style. Her prose is so clear that you can see the ache and hope shimmering at the bottom of these stories. This is a sad, lovely, and utterly convincing collection.” —Chris Bachelder

“In Katherine Zlabek’s terrific debut, When, one finds elements of Iris Murdoch (the stories’ astringency and darkness and verve) and Tom Drury (their idiosyncratic wit, often remote rural settings, sense of the shambolic picaresque, and their loving attention to the foibles of Midwestern speech). But one finds much more, too: Zlabek is an original, and the ways she combines these elements with her own quirky, antic, delightful voice(s) and with her depiction of strong, tough, quirky women make this book a revelation. Bravo!” —Michael Griffith

“Each story in Katherine Zlabek’s collection, When, is a revelation of character and place. Many of the stories are set in rural Midwestern towns and intimately dramatize the experiences of female characters from childhood into adulthood: Two girls drag a dead pig into a cornfield; a young woman stands alone over a stove in the night and savors a bull’s heart that’s simmering in a pot. The stories often deal in histories, and move skillfully through time. No one is who they seem to be—in family, friendship, and love. The collection is filled with clear-eyed and often humorous observations about the masks we all wear, and the many ways we fool ourselves so that we might fit in. When is artistically risky, deeply felt, and beautifully written.” —Patrick O'Keeffe

Notă biografică

Katherine Zlabek’s stories and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Kenyon Review, and Ninth Letter, among other journals. Ricochet Editions published her chapbook, Let the Rivers Clap Their Hands, in 2015. 

Extras

Let the Rivers Clap Their Hands
At eighteen, Theresa saw her grandmother trying to escape Alzheimer’s, only to get struck by, then sucked under, a bus. Since then, Theresa clings to details, absurdities, people. A Newsweek article said that in order to avoid Alzheimer’s, the best strategy was to grow as many brain synapses as possible. Don’t do the same things over and over again. Don’t say the same things over and over again. Snappy syntax is a must. Dendrites save lives. Clichés will kill you like a bus. Brush your teeth with your dominant hand to save your gum. Brush your teeth with your weak hand to save your granddaughter from a life of torment. These would be her mottos, if she wasn’t too terrified to repeat them.
She clings to Jack, and in the night, Jack has given up on sleep. The next two weeks are looming large. Weeks when he will be on the road, for one thing. And weeks when Theresa will be nannying a friend’s child. Nannying, he wants to say. Don’t you think it’s too soon after? But he can’t bring himself to say it. He wonders if he should even have to say it. He tries to focus on the morning run that won’t happen: Crisp air in his lungs. Pine trees breaking through gray skies. The rubbery kneecap snap, back and front. And his mind—a happy blank. Instead he sees all those puddles he will have to jump through just to get to his car, and the washed-out gravel, and the trees blown over.
He breathes and pushes all those night thoughts away, and with them that morning three months ago: the way Theresa’s body panted like a dog, the way she screamed like something was being torn out of her, because it was, and the way the baby hung there, silent, in the doctor’s slippery hands. 
But here are the hands, Theresa’s, clutching him.
“I dreamt I was a bomb,” she whispers. “I destroyed everything.”
Jack folds the covers down and leads her to the kitchen, where she sits on their ripped vinyl chair, her upper body draped on the table, her cheek on the Formica. She stares at the scotch, which Jack has not diluted this time, and her eyes follow the shadowy pattern of flowers that the etched tumbler casts around the room. She sits up and drinks. Jack leans against the countertop. He sees Theresa as she is: a mess of brown hair, a heap of clothes, a puffy face. He knows that, since the baby, these are the terms she has come to associate with herself, whom neither of them recognizes. Her daily speech has taken on the nuanced mumble of subway traffic, confused and sedated—slowing with What’s the point? and coming to a full stop with I have no point.
Now, as she tells him about her dream, he can see the panic in her eyes. She clasps her head and tells him about the sound like a mosquito trapped in her ear and the air pressing on her as she traveled through the sky, how it felt like she was shrinking rapidly, the air wrenched out of her, her skin flaking off like shingles. And through it all, the slow motion feeling of disaster with which she’s so familiar. Then bang. Everything destroyed. The city looks like crumpled wrapping paper spread over the carpet on Christmas morning.
When she finishes, she is crying. “I always wanted a Christmas that looked like that.” She looks to Jack for answers he doesn’t have. He dreads these sentences that run out of her mouth in the night. They’re like silk scarves pulled by a magician, scarves that become crows when thrown into the air, and hover overhead.

Cuprins

Table of Contents
 
 
Higgins………………………………………….4
 
Hunting the Rut..……………………………….27
 
Love Me, and the World Is Mine……………...44
 
If There Is Need of Blessings…………………..64
 
So Very Nice…………………………………....85
 
Fennimore……………….……………………...104
 
Passing………………………………………….122
 
Let the Rivers Clap Their Hands……………....141
 
Circumstances…………………………………..155
 

Descriere

Stories illuminating harsh Midwest realities vibrate with yearning and beauty in this debut collection.