Best New American Voices 2003 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156007169 ISBN 13: 9780156007160

Publisher: Harvest Books, 2002

Synopsis

Since its launch in 2000, the Best New American Voices series has been acclaimed for the range and originality of its selections, which represent the writers who promise to become the literary stars of tomorrow. The 2003 collection continues the tradition, featuring innovative, powerful stories selected by one of our finest writers of contemporary fiction, Joyce Carol Oates. With pieces culled from more than one hundred prestigious writing programs around the country and Canada, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Sewanee Conference, this volume showcases a remarkable array of talent--and offers the excitement of discovering a new generation of writers.

A Harvest Original

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than seventy books and the winner of numerous prizes, including the National Book Award. Her most recent fiction includes We Were the Mulvaneys. She teaches at Princeton University.

John Kulka is a senior editor at Yale University Press.

Natalie Danford is a book critic whose writing has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, among other publications.

From Publishers Weekly

Guest editor Oates attempts a "swerve of engagement" in these 15 mostly staid, well-behaved stories culled from American writing programs and workshops. Sober realism rather than exhilarating experimentation characterizes most of the youngish voices and death is an obsessive presence. "Good," by Cheryl Strayed, provides the titillating opening tale: a young, emotionally disconsolate woman whose mother is dying of cancer has a briefly comforting affair with an older man whose wife is dying in the same hospital. Esi Edugyan's "The Woman Who Tasted of Rose Oil" treats the death of a loved one with surreal grace: a middle-aged woman returns after her death to the home she shared with her husband of 34 years. Hal Horton's "The Year Draws in the Day" delineates the awful, numbing realization of mortality for a young gay man who tests HIV-positive while working in a hospice for AIDS patients. A few of the stories feel like pieces of longer work: "Peace," a riveting narrative by Dylan Tai Nguyen, relates a shattering incident in "re-education" for a Vietnamese boy who is forced by his teachers and fellow students to renounce his "subversive" father, a poet and journalist languishing in prison. While John Murray's "A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies," tracing the neurotic inner conflicts of a surgeon couple, stands out among the selections for its ambitious range, Laura Hawley's "The Good Life" offers welcome comic relief in its depiction of an upscale e-business couple convinced that their new, state-of-the-art home is haunted. Overall, there are good reasons to expect promising futures from many of these writers.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvest Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0156007169
• ISBN 13: 9780156007160
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Oates Joyce Carol, Kulka John, Danford Natalie