The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions - Softcover

Doerr, Harriet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140251480 ISBN 13: 9780140251487

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1996

Synopsis

In her first collection of stories and pieces, Harriet Doerr explores the magical power of memory and brings us a wealth of unforgettable characters: eccentric eighty-two-year-old Great-Aunt Alice, who, empowered by a lucid memory, lived out her final, physically debilitated years with grace; Edie, who arrives in California from England to bring sanity and peace to a house with five half-orphaned children and a despairing widower; Paco, eight years old, and Gloria, eleven, children caught between the longing and pleasures of childhood and the harsh mature realities of their meager circumstances in a Mexican village. These and other characters are captured in the web of life with a startling sensitivity that will touch the reader at every turn.
 
“Strikingly pure and radiant.”—The New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Harriet Doerr (1910-2002) was the author of Tiger in the Grass, Consider This, Senora, and Stones for Ibarra, which received the American Book Award for First Work of Fiction, and was translated into ten languages and published in twelve countries abroad. She received her BA from Stanford in 1977, and then continued in the Creative Writing Program, where she was named a Stegner Fellow.

From Booklist

Perhaps memory has been the leitmotiv of Doerr's lovely novels, Stones for Ibarra (1984) and Consider This, Senora (1993), because she began writing late in life. Here, in this elegant collection of stories and "inventions," never before published in book form, Doerr opens the window on her own past: childhood in California, marriage before completing college to the man she would live with for more than 40 years, child-rearing experiences, and the bold decision to return to school after the death of her husband. These are revelatory tales full of tenderness, humor, and gratitude, but the jewels of the collection are Doerr's stories about life in Mexico, the place dearest to her heart. She conjures the light, smells, and sounds of Mexico with enrapturing clarity and creates characters both amusing and tragic. Again, we can't help but think that the precision and essentiality of Doerr's style are the felicitous result of her having kept her stories to herself for so long: they've been polished in the bright surf of her mind. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140251480
• ISBN 13: 9780140251487
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224