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Cargando... I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories (edición 2002)por Mary Ladd Gavell
Información de la obraI Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories por Mary Ladd Gavell
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Stories by a nearly forgotten author. 3.5 ( ) As even the most earnest student longs for graduation, the most faithful employee yearns for retirement, so Martha Hedges looked forward to widowhood. She would not by word or deed have attempted to hasten such an outcome; this is not a murder story. On the contrary, she was a devoted wife who lived in loving concord with a genuinely good husband. Being, in her shy and quiet way, a devout woman, she expected eventually to join Harold in Heaven for all eternity; but she counted on a nice long vacation first. Were John Cheever to have had a twin sister who also wrote short stories, and had that imaginary sister spent time as a child in the loving care of her aunts, Dorothy Parker and Dawn Powell, she might write like Mary Ladd Gavell, the author of a single slim book of short stories. I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories is a collection of wonderfully written stories that combine both depth and heart, while avoiding sentimentality and regard life with an eye for the subtle humor. Gavell died unpublished; it was only when a single short story (The Rotifer) was published in a trade magazine as a tribute to her, that she was discovered. The few stories she did write are sublime. My favorite is Baucis, which begins with the above paragraph. Gavell's stories concern the domestic; a child taking the school bus, an older couple caring for her mother as she dies, another couple on the search for antiques in New England, and they are pitch perfect. I'll be holding on to my copy because I know that I'll want to reread this more than a few times. If you prefer your short stories to be rip-roarin', sexed up, or fantastic, you probably won't appreciate this collection. Gavell's stories are, for the most part, gentle slice-of-life tales of ordinary people; many of them are set in and around the small Texas town where she lived until her death in 1967. I first discovered Gavell's short story "The Swing" (included here) a few years ago, when looking for themed stories for a course I was teaching, and I liked it so well that I sought out more of her work. While "The Swing" remains my favorite, I also enjoyed all of the stories in this collection. They are small stories: a girl gives a doll to someone less fortunate; a couple makes their son's George Washington costume; a farmer's wife dupes a city couple; a family gathers at an old woman's deathbed; a teacher regrets not having praised a child's beautiful handwriting; a woman comes to appreciate the daughter-in-law she initially rejected. There's an apt quote form the Chicago Sun-Times on the cover: Everyone should have this book on their shelf . . . for the pleasure of reading a perfect story again and again. The Random House edition includes a fine introduction by Kaye Gibbons and a short essay by Gavell's son, remembering his mother. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
It is the stuff of fiction: A collection of stories, never made public, is lost in a drawer for thirty years until, miraculously, the stories are discovered and published. It is also the true story of the book you are holding in your hands. Mary Ladd Gavell died in 1967 at the age of forty-seven, having published nothing in her lifetime. She was the managing editor of Psychiatry magazine in Washington, D.C., and after her death, her colleagues ran her story "The Rotifer" in the magazine as a tribute. The story was, somehow, plucked from that nonliterary journal and selected for The Best American Short Stories 1967. And again, thirty-three years later, "The Rotifer" emerged from near obscurity when John Updike selected it for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In his Introduction to that collection, Updike called Gavell's story a "gem" and said that her writing was "feminism in literary action." "The Rotifer" has remained, until now, Gavell's only published work. The sixteen stories collected here include the anthologized classic "The Rotifer," in which a young woman learns the extent to which a bit of innocent interference, or the refusal to interfere, can change the course of lives. "The Swing" depicts a mother's strange reconnection to her adult son's childhood as she is summoned outside, night after night, by the creak of his old swing. "Baucis" introduces a woman longing for widowhood who is cheated of the respite she craves and whose last words are tragically misunderstood by her family. The title story, based on the last-minute announcement by Gavell's own son that he was in a school play, is infused with the gentle humor and vivid insights that make all of Mary Ladd Gavell's stories timeless and utterly beguiling. With the publication of I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, Mary Ladd Gavell takes her rightful place among the best writers of her, and our, time. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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