Circling the Drain: Stories - Softcover

Davis, Amanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688179096 ISBN 13: 9780688179090

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2000

Synopsis

          Enter into the worlds of fifteen young women who, despite their vastly different circumstances, seem to negotiate an eerily similar and unavoidably dangerous emotional terrain. With a visceral bite or a surreal edge, each electrically charged story in Circling the Drain presents women trying to understand the nature of loss-of leaving or being left-and discovering that in the throes of feverish conflict, things are rarely what they seem. By turns dark and lyrical, ferocious and playful, these stories are precise, startling, and undeniably original. Reading them is a cathartic, mesmerizing literary experience.

About this title

Review:

In 15 short stories, Amanda Davis takes the raw emotions of love and loss and throws them into surreal perspective. Sometimes the stories are explicitly fantastic and dreamlike, like the romance with the "boy who chased freight trains" in "Chase." Sometimes the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred--the high school protagonist of "Faith or Tips for the Successful Young Lady," for example, has a "fat girl" companion that only she can see, a mocking chorus that forces her to recall the traumatic incident that led to her suicide attempt. And sometimes the surrealism comes from slowing a "realistic" moment down to closely examine its various perceptual components, as in "The Very Moment They're About," which captures two adolescents just before their kiss. Or in this scene from the title story, when a jilted lover jumps off the Williamsburg Bridge:

Later it is the air she will remember. The sharpness of it as she inhaled: crisp like paper. She could have been breathing paper. There was a rush of sound, like a train passing, or maybe like she was the train. Thick colors swirled and time became molasses as her legs slowly tumbled around behind her and then over her head. She thought that it was like being inside a spin-art toy. She was the blob of paint spreading thinly every which way, spindling in all directions, pulled flat, slow and hard. That was how she tumbled and then time caught up with itself and she dropped.

That intricate dissection of a moment's sensual and emotional register comes through in even the most naturalistic of these stories ("Red Lights Like Laughter," "The Visit"). Circling the Drain reveals Amanda Davis as a skilled crafter of character and tone, and marks her as an author to watch for some time to come. --Ron Hogan

About the Author:

Amanda Davis was raised in Durham, North Carolina. She was tragically killed in a plane crash on her way to her childhood state where she was scheduled to promote her debut novel, Wonder When You'll Miss Me, published in February 2003. She resided in Oakland, California, where she taught in the MFA program at Mills College. Davis also authored Circling the Drain, a collection of short stories. Her fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have been published in Esquire, Bookforum, Black Book, McSweeney's, Poets and Writers, Story, Seventeen, and Best New American Voices 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0688179096
• ISBN 13: 9780688179090
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208