Gates of Eden: Stories - Softcover

Coen, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061684880 ISBN 13: 9780061684883

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories—from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.

About this title

Review

Small-time mobsters, private investigators, adulterers, and Hebrew-school students populate these stories written by Ethan Coen, the Oscar-winning cowriter of the Fargo screenplay. Read mostly by actors who have appeared in his films--including regulars Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, and John Turturro--these vignettes are set primarily in Minneapolis. There is a lot of fighting, farting, and the other f word in these tapes, disqualifying this audiobook for the fainthearted, but the listener is well rewarded with some smart, if brutal, writing. Standouts include the Matt Dillon-read "Destiny," a Mafioso story about a college graduate-cum-failed boxer whose poverty sucks him into an underworld rivalry, and William H. Macy's reading of the title story, a tongue-in-cheek noir featuring a Californian who is temporarily distracted from his work by a geisha goddess. (Running time: 5.5 hours, 4 cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

From the Inside Flap

A middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly explains how she drove him to it . . . A fat little mafioso is going to war--in the clean, well-mannered streets of Minneapolis . . . A Jewish boy watches with wonder the rise and fall of a Hebrew school rebel--and sees the sadness at the heart of his own family. . . . Welcome to the world of Ethan Coen, one half of the filmmaking team that has unleashed a visionary, brutal, and uproarious portrait of America in such screen classics as "Fargo and "Raising Arizona. Now Ethan Coen translates that vision to the printed page--in fourteen keenly imagined, sharply etched short stories. Blending parody with pathos, making the heinous heartbreaking, Coen demonstrates his unique gift for stunningly inventive narrative, brutal irony, offbeat characters, and crackling dialogue, delivering everything you would expect from such an original imagination.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061684880
• ISBN 13: 9780061684883
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261