Johnny Too Bad: Stories - Softcover

Dufresne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393328716 ISBN 13: 9780393328714

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

A collection by "a generous and lyric storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle) known for his tragicomic voice and his unforgettable and lively characters.

In John Dufresne's stories people are caught unawares by trouble and opportunity in the act of going about their daily lives. A romantic woman, involved with her married boss, is proposed to by a Bulgarian on a tourist visa in search of a green card and must choose between a wedding and a love affair. A doctor who has killed two women escorts a flamboyant woman home to tell her about his rage and her foolishness. Four young brothers wander into a man's backyard claiming to be foster children. They share lunch and search for the foster home that doesn't exist. After a man tells his wife that he's leaving her and his children for his new lover, he's found dead in the morning. It's up to our literary hero to solve the mystery―murder, he wrote. A cross between William Faulkner (Times-Picayune) and John Irving (Detroit Free Press), Dufresne once again masterfully charts the power of truth and lies and the magic hidden in the mundane.

About this title

About the Author

John Dufresne is the author of elevenprevious books, including three fiction writing guides. A professor in the MFA program at Florida International University, he lives in Dania Beach.

From Publishers Weekly

A smalltown policeman obsessed with a crime of passion; a hyperactive hound who prefers a Barbie to a bone. The vagaries of man and beast are fodder for acclaimed novelist Dufresne (Louisiana Power & Light, etc.) in his energetic second collection. Southern Florida is the setting, a place whose sultry clime seems to foster off-kilter displays. (Indeed, Dufresne's relentlessly skewed perspective means these 18 stories are best savored over the course of several days.) Florida is "tough on fiction writers," says the narrator of "Squeeze the Feeling." "How do you compete with daily life?" Dufresne writes of the betrayals that level romantic relationships, wondering how "you could go from finishing each other's sentences to not talking for twenty years." In the 18 linked entries of the title story, a woman has a love child with Bigfoot, a dog named Spot performs Shakespeare (sort of: he runs for the door when an ersatz Lady Macbeth rubs her hands and orders him "out") and two lovers wait out a tornado by curling up in a tub. "Life doesn't get any sweeter when you grow up," laments betrayed husband Rance in "Talk, Talk, Talk." But in the writings of Dufresne, whose tales are marinated in melancholy and sprinkled with wit, it is the piquant nature of the journey that keeps readers engaged.
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0393328716
• ISBN 13: 9780393328714
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266