Off the Beaten Path: Stories of Place - Hardcover

Nature Conservancy (U. S.)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 086547530X ISBN 13: 9780865475304

Publisher: North Point Pr, 1998

Synopsis

A collection of short fiction featuring the contributions of Jill McCorkle, Eric Lustbader, Rick Bass, Rita Mae Brown, Barry Lopez, E. Annie Proulx, and other writers

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Barbato is a director of development communications and editorial projects at the Nature Conservancy and a contributing editor to Publishers Weekly. Lisa Weinerman Horak works in the Latin American and Caribbean divisions of the conservancy.

Reviews

Thirteen literary powerhouses, including Annie Proulx, Howard Norman, Rita Mae Brown and Lee Smith, visited Nature Conservancy sites and contributed top-of-form short stories to this excellent collection. As Barbara Kingsolver explains in her foreword, the writers "took pilgrimages to places where they could think straight, remember, and properly invent." While paeans to wild places, most of these tales are imaginative flights transcending setting. Norman's "The Chauffeur" is a haunting account of the relationship between a bookish driver, Tuttle Albers, and the older Japanese woman he transports each week from San Francisco to Point Reyes National Seashore, where she never does see the white pelican she's looking for. After she dies, Tuttle's experience with an injured pelican affects his romantic relationship with a zoologist. Also a standout is Richard Bausch's "Glass Meadow," in which two young boys are adrift with their irresponsible parents. When they hole up in an empty cabin and the father orders them to go out and kill something to eat, 12-year-old narrator Patrick comes up against his own savage nature in a comical, bittersweet encounter with a phlegmatic cow. Humor also enriches Brown's "Early Lessons," in which the young narrator learns from her feuding mother and aunt about the food chain. While some storiesA"A Blackfoot River Fable" by David James Duncan and "Fiber" by Rick BassAare didactic, and othersASmith's "Botanizing upon the Mountain"Aare enigmatic, overall this is a cohesive whole, evoking the spirit of our nation's wild landscape and its power to nurture and to heal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a follow-up to their 1995 collection, Heart of the Land, Nature Conservancy staffers Barbato and Weinerman Horak here assemble 13 original stories by American writers (some of whom were included in the previous anthology) who mix their own magic with that of the Conservancy lands they were invited to visit. After a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver, who describes her affinity for wild places by sharing her feelings at having a bobcat unexpectedly approach her writing-desk window, the tales begin with Howard Norman's ``The Chauffeur,'' a quietly compelling view of relationships in which a San Francisco driver's romance with a biologist working at an elk refuge near Point Reyes National Seashore is disrupted by the death of the woman who brought them togetheran elderly Japanese woman who traveled weekly from the city to Point Reyes in the hope of glimpsing a rare white pelican. ``The Half-skinned Steer,'' E. Annie Proulx recounts a lonely old man's return after decades to the Wyoming ranch where he was born, only to face death in a snowstorm. And in ``Hush,'' Eric Lustbader gives us a Florida woman transformed by an encounter with a brown bear in the Alaskan wilderness; as a result, she finally comes to terms with her best friend's suicide during their adolescence, and also opens herself to the sexuality she'd for so long denied. A lighter look at the significance of place is provided by Rita Mae Brown in ``Early Lessons,'' depicting two wrangling sisters on a futile Chesapeake Bay fishing trip, as observed by one's six-year-old daughter. These and similar offerings, along with a few more straightforward ``save the wilderness'' tales, comprise a diverse, rewarding assortmentand an impressive testament to the important role played by nature in inspiring writers to create stories that touch us all. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Nature Conservancy, an organization that preserves wild areas by buying land and turning it over to other preservation groups, asked several writers to visit Conservancy sites of their choice. Each writer was invited to create a short story based loosely or tightly on actual experience. An earlier book in this vein, Heart of the Land: Essays on Last Great Places (LJ 1/95), consisted of nonfiction pieces. This collection is made up of 13 short stories and an introduction by such authors as Barry Lopez, E. Annie Proulx, and Barbara Kingsolver. Although some of the tales are quite good, the thread that holds the group together is tenuous. In some cases, such as David James Duncan's "A Blackfoot River Fable," the story is closely linked with a place. In others, the linkage is slight, making the collection seem a little misleading. Nevertheless, a nice effort.?George M. Jenks, Bucknell Univ., Lewisburg, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Point Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 086547530X
• ISBN 13: 9780865475304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Barbato Joseph, Horak Lisa Weinerman, Weinerman Lisa