As its title suggests, this collection is a sort of human list and found department. It is peopled with odd, vivid characters, often alone and displaced, immigrants from Turkey, Algeria, Egypt, Chile or lost souls in their own homeland, wanderers in whose world the miraculous is ever lurking, always possible. Many live in Paris —a dilapidated, largely unseen Paris of sweatshops and dingy hotels. Some have left their countries, like the wily Miss Carmen, to see what could be had; others, like the clubfooted Sliman, are driven by spiritual desire. For all of them, the experience of exile, real or imagined, is a catalyst to liberation—a liberation described by Marsella with compassion and a touch of the mystical.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Anne Marsella was born in Fresno, California. She earned a degree in French Literature at Mills College and spent two year on the south of France as a student and teacher. She later received a Maitrise de Lettres Modernes from the Universite of Paris VIII, Saint Denis. For the past five years she has been living in Paris where she writes and teaches English at the CETEC, Universite de Paris-Dauphine. Winner of the 1993 WISE Short Story Contest, Marsella has published several of her stories in the Paris transcontinental.
This first book, a story collection showing immense mastery of character, dialect, and narrative, won the 1993 Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. Born in Fresno, California, Marsella lives in Paris and writes largely about people of the underclasses or Third World, men and women from places like Chile, Nigeria, Istanbul, Morocco, and Mexico, slipping like a cat into myriad psyches and argots. Though she writes usually in a voice mirroring that of her characters, she fears no oddity of language, coming up with nutty tidbits that drive you to the dictionary. (When did you last use nimiety, embrangle, emulous, or partible?) In ``Miss Carmen,'' a Chilean woman arrives ``in the Valley of San Joaquin'' in California, gets a job polishing silver for a rich woman, gets a crush on a Mexican foreman but loses him, perhaps through her own small-minded pride. In ``The Roommates,'' Mary, a big, lanky girl from Kenya, shares a room in Paris with Selma from Istanbul, then with Selma's lover, a Greek sweatshop foreman who also happens to be their married boss, and finally, after two years, abandons the dominating Selma to go live with an albino English gentleman in London. In ``Testimony,'' a Hispanic priest falls obsessively in love with his seminary's young atheist gardener and finds himself driven into invisibility, or so he thinks, as day by day his own body parts begin disappearing. In the comic title story, an unmarried Mexican woman living in Paris works for four years as a hired clapper for TV's ``Objets Trouv‚s'' (or ``The Lost and Found Show''), seeks her lost father through the personals, and, after she's betrayed by St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless, finds herself instead. Distinguished indeed. May Marsella take on the novel. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
US$ 6.00
Within U.S.A.
Seller: Old Algonquin Books, Arvada, CO, U.S.A.
Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First edition. Collection of ten short stories; winner of Elmer Holmes Bobst award. Mylar cover on dust jacket. Seller Inventory # 10978
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: MARK POST, BOOKSELLER, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.
Hard Cover. First Edition, First printing. AS NEW IN DJ. UNCOMMON. Seller Inventory # 5689
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: MULTI BOOK, Cerreto Laziale, RM, Italy
rilegato. Condition: Perfetto (Mint). 9780814755020 Perfetto (Mint) . Seller Inventory # 0000000035264
Quantity: 1 available