Fire Road
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Book Overview
Stephen Mann-- loyal son, war veteran, divorced father--is the subject of Donald Anderson's contemporary short-story cycle, Fire Road. In this award-winning collection, Mann negotiates life's punches through gain and loss, love and death, and the all too random dangers of being human. Woven between each personal story are poetic vignettes of isolated moments-- the headlines in a morning paper, a political murder--and the century's most violent tragedies--the bombing of Hiroshima, the firestorm at Dresden. Each vingette is a constant, powerful reminder of the human capacity to love and, ultimately, to destroy. A bruising view of one man's tumultuous journey through life, Fire Road explores the small and large crimes we all commit in the name of love and fear, despair and longing.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0877457786
ISBN13:9780877457787
Release Date:October 2001
Publisher:University of Iowa Press
Length:212 Pages
Weight:0.66 lbs.
Dimensions:0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
The Montana Beckett
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 23 years ago
Anderson's short-story cycle is one of the best I've read in the last 25 years. The first chapters made me sweat when I read them; the prose was so intense and purely written, distilled language that resembles the best single-malt scotch or Sinatra during his middle phase. Anderson's style is mixture of Hemingway, Dubus, and Beckett (if that Irish writer had been from the American West, he'd have written like this).The one aspect about this writing that I particularly savor is that while it is about the loss of love, children, friends, and fathers, and suffering, blown intestines, the stuff of real pain, it is also about living with all that agony one is asked to endure; it is about surviving with grace and dignity. It is about making art. Like the end of Beckett's great trilogy, it is about going on.Although I enjoyed "Fire Road," the story that gives the book its title, I favored other stories more, "Wonder Bread," "Weather," and "Luck." This is a serious work of art by a writer with talent. I can't wait until the his next work of art arrives.
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