The Half-Mammals of Dixie George Singleton

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George Singleton - «The Half-Mammals of Dixie»

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Amazon.comWhile it often seems true that every town in America has become depressingly alike, fully franchised and chain-stored to death, short story writer George Singleton offers a compelling rebuttal in his second collection, The Half-Mammals of Dixie. Almost all 15 of its stories are set in or around a fictional South Carolina town called Forty Five, and Singleton"s eccentric characters--flea-market hustlers, a fish aquarium salesman, a bogus "primitive" artist--are hard to imagine outside thenarrow civic boundaries of his singular imagination.

A writing teacher and ashtray-collecting, flea-market hound himself, Singleton builds most of his stories around first-person narrators, evoking such writers as Flannery O"Connor, Barry Hannah, andRaymond Carver, but infusing each tale with his own brand of sly humor and outsider skepticism. Singleton is particularly good at capturing the rhythms and peculiarities of southern speech, as in this passage from "When Children Count": "You sound exactly like my dead sister," this woman said, pushing her full cart into Tammy"s backside. "I ain"t never heard nothing like that. Say this: "I will never, ever order a club sandwich here, what with the ptomaine." Say it. Say."

While most of the stories are funny--"Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award" is an absolute marvel of conception and execution--a few of the tales that hit hardest are much darker. Especially haunting is "Bank of America," which centers around four childhood friends who still gather annually as adults in a swamp-land tree house, from which they fish for turtles and are forced, one fateful year, to confront the consequences of past misdeeds. Despite the story"s title, which refers to a character who works at a national chain of banks, Singleton tells the story in a voice that"s as unique as the flawed, but mostly likable, characters who populate his hometown. --Keith Moerer Book Description

This second collection of short stories by a bright star in Southern fictionshowcases a town so tiny it missed the map, the gleefully off-the-wall Southerners who refuse to be pigeonholed, and a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston. As the author says of his characters, "They"re regular people just trying to get by." Among them: a boy whose reputation is ruined when he appears in a head-lice documentary; a lovelorn father who woos his third-grader"s teacher with creative show-and-tells; and a former pharmaceuticals salesman who waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint on next the "primitive" canvases he sells for big bucks to an art dealer.

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Полное название книги George Singleton The Half-Mammals of Dixie
Автор George Singleton
Ключевые слова разные
Категории Художественная литература, Книги на иностранных языках
ISBN 156028581
Издательство
Год 2003
Название транслитом the-half-mammals-of-dixie-george-singleton
Название с ошибочной раскладкой the half-mammals of dixie george singleton