(story collection,
1995)
Canadian
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Canadian
HarperPerennial cover |
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A balance
struck between the wild comedy of Famous Players and
the psychological realism of White Buick. Its focus is
the strangeness and improbability of our relationships, their
potent effects upon us, the strange and improbable ways we seek
to be free and to be bound, and the stranger and more improbable
ways we succeed at both.
Twelve stories,
about a tenant who commits suicide in the garage, a housewife
who inadvertently gives away a box of medical supplies intended
for Sudan, a feckless young man's relationship with a stroke victim,
a boy's obsession with his parents' female boarder, a confessional
dinner party, a property appraiser who believes the end of the
world is near, a young man who returns home to find his parents
have given away his room, a man who discovers the meaning of life
on the roof of his house . . .
Reviews
"Here are
tiny, fiery worlds that make you roar with laughter in the first
paragraph, cry in the last. A magical, unmissable, crazily perfect
book." -- Julie Myerson, The Mail on Sunday [U.K.]
"Hollingshead
has a way of making the ordinary buckle and twist into something
quite bizarre . . . ." -- London Observer
"Wild, weird,
and wonderful: Hollingshead has perfectly fitted his voice to
his subject and crafted these tales with astonishing skill." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Like the
characters themselves, Hollingshead's crisp, energetic prose offers
surprising pleasures--expressions unique enough to press the narratives
forward, but not so odd that they are halting. These lean narratives
never feel forced and are frequently funny. Perhaps most impressively,
the humor seems completely natural, as human as grief or ecstasy." -- Publishers Weekly
"Hollingshead's
language . . . is spare and convincing and sweetly compatible
with its world." -- The Stranger Literary Supplement [Seattle]
"Life is an
adventure for the characters in these relaxed yet meticulously
observed stories .. . . No deviation from the norm is so minor
that it slips beneath their radar." -- Boston Sunday Globe
"The stories
. . . are all delightful, shimmering jewels . . . . Truly worth
buying." -- Library Journal
"Readers who
return to the book time and again will find plenty of occasion
to celebrate Hollingshead's eerily original, powerfully distinctive
voice." -- Time Out New York.
"With [Flannery
O'Connor] Hollingshead shares an eagle-eyed ability to evoke the
secret madnesses, the memories of past abuse, and the conflicts
over guilt that seethe under the surfaces among middle-aged people's
fair-to-middling way of life. . . . [But Hollingshead's] gifts
are his own, and they are large. They are also gifts he shares."
-- Quill & Quire.
"Like Northern
Exposure, Hollingshead's work is goofy in the best sense,
and he gives us philosophy and sentiment that are quicker, wilder,
and more darkly shadowed. Hollingshead may set a story in Saturday
Evening Post territory, but it will call for illustration
by George Grosz rather than Norman Rockwell." -- The Malahat
Review
" . . . a
fictional sensibility at once contemplative and spontaneous, whimsical
and harsh . . ." -- Charles Foran, Maclean's
"Writing as
funny, insinuating and endearing as this cannot go unbought much
longer." -- Bert Archer, The Globe and Mail
"You come
out of Hollingshead's stories convinced what you've witnessed
there was all new. The architecture of lives and situations might
be recognizable enough, but nobody carved the top off the ant
farm at quite this depth, quite this angle, before. And how uncommon
the cross-section, how marvelously revealing the view, how unsettling,
and how funny. . . . No question: The Roaring Girl announces
a roaring great talent." -- Stephen Smith, The Montreal Gazette
"These are
masterful stories, marvelously nuanced, accurate and well-made--but
what they speak to is the sensing of being mastered,
whether by plenitude or by poverty. It's a wonderfully attractive
thing in a writer this good. He knows the strangeness of this
dialogue, the weirdness of these lives; he cannot ever get over
it. He's in perpetual love, perpetual pain--because it's all so
astonishing and so recalcitrant, and because we keep on missing
the point." -- Constance Rooke, Canadian Literature
