Don't Worry about the Kids: Stories - Hardcover

Neugeboren, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558491139 ISBN 13: 9781558491137

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Synopsis

When Jay Neugeboren's first book of stories was published a quarter century ago, it was hailed by one critic as "the most penetrating and superbly written look at adolescence since J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye." Since then, Neugeboren has published more than fifty new stories, many of which have won prizes and/or been chosen for anthologies. This volume brings together fifteen examples of his best work―stories that are by turns violent and tender, lyric and stark, terrifying and playful, funny and surreal.

Although the voices and settings of these tales are diverse, their central concerns remain constant. Neugeboren explores the precarious nature of family life and those elements―madness, betrayal, loss―that often shape and threaten it. He writes about the mysterious, sad, surprising, and sometimes beautiful ways in which love expresses itself. He reveals how our choices, large and small, inform and define our lives.

Whether writing about a black American musician in Paris or a documentary filmmaker in Maine, about a boy grieving for the death of his father or parents for the loss of their children, about divorce or city life or basketball or mental illness, Neugeboren brings to his craft a profound knowledge of the heart's imperatives.

This volume is the mature, seasoned work of one of our finest writers.

About this title

About the Author:

Author of eleven books, most recently a memoir--Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival--Jay Neugeboren is professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fifteen polished stories by the veteran author of, most recently, a deeply felt memoir of his brother, Imagining Robert (1997). In the title piece, a surgeon named Michael has a cup of coffee with the man appointed by the court to investigate his broken marriage and determine custody arrangements. Neugeboren cunningly orders things so that, at first, the reader sympathizes with Michael, then slowly comes to realize that he's been a bit of a monster. The same persona--a smart, professional, newly divorced man--appears several times here. In ``Tolstoy in Maine,'' a highly successful filmmaker is hiding from himself in a seacoast town. He, too, has recently gone through a divorce, and misses his kids, and feels his ex-wife lied about him. In the town, he meets a beautiful divorc‚e who draws him out and loves him tenderly, only to disappear in the morning. Then Neugeboren offers her story, too, and the pathos of her disappearance turns romantic--and hopeful. He also takes romance about as far as a realistic writer can in the imaginative ``What Is the Good Life?,'' a spy story set in France. Neugeboren reflects on Grace Kelly both as an actress and a princess in the voice of a Grace Kellylike character who's killed by an assassin after an impossibly romantic love affair. The amusing ``In Memory of Jane Fogarty'' concerns a psychiatrist who receives half a million dollars in insurance money when a patient of hers dies in a plane crash. The patient named her as sole beneficiary, but his parents are having none of it. A court battle is about to ensue, making the reader wonder who's crazier: the dead man, or all the people fighting for his money? Neugeboren's sensibilities are exclusively northeastern and upper-middle class, which probably describes his readers as well. This time, he gives them their money's worth, and then some. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1558491139
• ISBN 13: 9781558491137
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192