Items related to In the House of Blue Lights (Richard Sullivan Prize...
Synopsis
A collection of short stories by Susan Neville. The house referred to in the title is a specific place in midwestern American folklore, but the blue also refers to the blue of the globe as seen from space and the blue lights that flicker behind closed eyelids in the house of the imagination.
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About the Author
Susan Neville's collection of short fiction "In the House of Blue Lights" won the Richard Sullivan Prize and was listed as a Notable Book by the "Chicago Tribune". Her stories have appeared in many anthologies including the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the author of several works of creative nonfiction. Neville teaches writing at Butler University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
From Kirkus Reviews
0-268-01184-2 A frustratingly uneven second collection (which nevertheless won this year's Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction) by the author of The Invention of Flight (1984). Hospitals and sickrooms are recurring settings in these 14 varied though uniformly moody stories, which often focus on mother-daughter tensions, unraveling marriages or affairs, and the traumatizing losses of loved ones. Three especially fine pieces stand out: ``Playhouse,'' though it's only a vignette, neatly illustrates the discomfiting resilience with which children separate themselves from their parents. In ``Witch,'' a tired waitress's bonding with her four children is strengthened by the story, which she hears secondhand, of a lonely customer's ``spirit'' pregnancy. And in ``Night Train,'' an old woman views a notorious case of abduction and rape through the distorting prism of her own erotic memories. The other stories, which are much inferior, offer far too many insufficiently differentiated portraits of ambivalent, betrayed, or destroyed relationships. A young woman's tale (``Blue'') of her grandfather's frustrated love for his (perhaps psychotic) second wife is left unresolved. So are ``Eclipse,'' which charts the relations among an unfaithful husband, his passive wife, and his hospitalized lover; ``Your Own Private Voice,'' about a mother lost to narcolepsy; and ``Quinella,'' which portrays a troubled couple unable to rejuvenate their intimacy by a trip to a racetrack. Too many of Neville's weaker stories blend together unaccountably as one reads them. Altogether, they seem like fragments of an unwritten (and perhaps unwrite-able) novel. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherUniv of Notre Dame Pr
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0268011834
- ISBN 13 9780268011833
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages169
- Rating
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