Blue Money: Stories (Volume 1) - Softcover

Hubbard, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826212107 ISBN 13: 9780826212108

Publisher: University of Missouri, 1999

Synopsis

A union organizer returns to her hometown and her high school sweetheart, only to discover unexpected peril. A middle-aged man walks to meet his wife at work one day and loses her forever. A young writer's stage fright destroys her work and her marriage but offers her a new life. In Blue Money, Susan Hubbard creates a world in which the most ordinary things can be magical, and the most ordinary people can be extraordinary.

"Selling the House" is the enchanting story of Marianne, a young housewife whose life is altered forever by a mysterious stranger. He suddenly appears on her doorstep one morning, offers to buy her home, quotes poetry, and just as suddenly disappears. Marianne soon discovers, however, that the stranger wants more than her house—he wants her. Although she does not accept the man's proposition, Marianne has been changed by it. His words echo throughout her life. "If she sometimes had trouble sleeping, if she spent more time reading poetry or staring out the window . . . well, those were small aberrations in an otherwise quite satisfactory life."

Strangers appear and disappear in Blue Money. Shoes charm and cure. A soiled shirt conjures conscience, and a clean one promises new identity. Hubbard brilliantly weaves these fantastic elements into the fabric of her fiction.

Women's relationships with men—whether they be fathers, lovers, or strangers—are a prominent theme of Hubbard's collection. "What Friends Are For" captures this theme at its most humorous and bizarre in the strange mishaps of two young girls trying to rid their lives of the stepfathers they despise. When their plan fails miserably, the girls are forced to accept the unwanted men, but not without finding brief comfort in the humor of their failure. "Then I start laughing too--a laugh I've never laughed before, like some exotic bird, high and shrill and free—and now [we're] laughing so hard that the voices outside fade away entirely."

Praised by Ploughshares as "an assured storyteller and a complex narrative stylist," Hubbard excels at writing spare yet powerfully evocative prose. Haunting in its suspense and subtle grace, Blue Money celebrates Hubbard's marvelous ability to explore the power of imagination.

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Hubbard's first fiction collection, Walking on Ice, won the Associated Writing Programs' Short Fiction Prize. She currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to the darker side of interpersonal relations, these 13 stories debunk Rockwellian myths of familial happiness. In "Mrs. Abernathy's Cottage," a young kleptomaniac, Leslie, figures as a surrogate daughter for a crotchety old woman. Pinching her silver spoons even as she politely pours the tea, Leslie intentionally corrupts their friendship and undermines the trust that the vulnerable Mrs. Abernathy places in her. In "Conversations with Men," a union organizer returns to Buffalo in order to salvage her relationship with her ailing father. After that attempt fails, she seeks solace in a father figure whose startling sexual advance leaves her even more disoriented. Despite the sorrows that beset her characters, Hubbard (Walking on Ice) relieves despair with moments of hope. Her characters find redemption in shared laughter or unexpected complicity. Their final words often abound with a complicated, sometimes ironic, optimism: "I'm lucky to be alive"; "I woke up laughing, amazed at my fertility"; "It will grow. It will grow." Unhappiness is, for these characters, an episode, and eerie encounters are containable. So when Marianne in "Selling the House" receives roses that "looked well for nearly two weeks, although they never fully bloomed," one knows that the bouquet augurs a future in which flowers bloom everywhere.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0826212107
• ISBN 13: 9780826212108
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200