Distance No Object: Stories - Softcover

Frym, Gloria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872863581 ISBN 13: 9780872863583

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 1999

Synopsis

In Distance No Object, Gloria Frym turns her ironic, passionate gaze to post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco. Private lives are still swept along by the currents of history, as in the sixties. But the names of the wars have changed…the bombs fall on Iraq, and "the war on poverty" becomes a war against the poor. The stories of Distance No Object evoke the deep frustrations between generations, friends, neighbors, and races. Yet civility, quotidian justice, a common language, and new love are imagined…and Kafka finds his true bride.

"Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges between strangers on trains, estranged husbands and wives, and errant children and their parents in this sensitive and assured collection…Frym focuses on sensitive social issues…her politically charged narratives are among her best."—Publishers Weekly

"…a collection that is possibly ahead of its time while it masquerades as an elegy for an end to an era."—Austin Chronicle

"Quiet and moving in their intensity of feeling."—Kirkus Reviews

"Put Gloria Frym's splendidly knowing vision of the urban with Grace Paley's and Stephen Dixon's. Her voice is tender, searching, and ever so slightly insolent—you greet these stories like friends stopping by unannounced, friends so beguiling that you wish they'd stay longer than they do."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun, with Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon

"Gloria Frym's stories strike me as going directly to the heart in a rational way. They hurt by being clear and reasonable—like William Carlos Williams' poetry, say. But hurt doesn't mean hurt, exactly; it means affected in a necessary way."—Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses

Gloria Frym is no stranger to the literary scene, having been a writer and teacher for over two decades. She attended the University of New Mexico under the tutelage of poet Robert Creeley. "Creeley had quite a bit of national acclaim by that time," says Frym, "but I didn't know it. I just knew he was important to me and his presence brought a lot of important writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and others—to what was essentially an outpost on Route 66." Gloria Frym is the author of a previous collection of short stories, How I Learned, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and the forthcoming Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco.

About this title

About the Author

Gloria Frym is no stranger to the literary scene, having been a writer and teacher for over two decades. She attended the University of New Mexico under the tutelage of poet Robert Creeley. "Creeley had quite a bit of national acclaim by that time," says Frym, "but I didn’t know it. I just knew he was important to me and his presence brought a lot of important writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and others—to what was essentially an outpost on Route 66." As she saw many of her friends moving to New York and San Francisco to get more serious about their careers, she chose Berkeley.

Upon arrival in the Bay Area, Frym made her way easily into the active poetry scene here. "I knew a lot of people who had small presses—those were the glory days for small press work," says Frym. "And there was the café reading life around that. Maybe it was because other people preceded me and invited me, but things fell into my lap. One reading led to another. I published books early and rapidly. That’s not quite the case for young poets today. I suppose we lived, or I lived, as though I had some kind of trust fund, which I didn’t. I was poor, but it seemed like I always went where I wanted to go."

Frym went on to publish Second Stories, a book of interviews with women who began their artistic careers after age 35, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and the forthcoming Homeless at Home. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at the New College of California in San Francisco.

Reviews

Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges between strangers on trains, estranged husbands and wives and errant children and their parents in this sensitive and assured collection of 24 short stories. Looming in the background is Berkeley, Calif., its latitudinarian, countercultural past fading as it morphs into an ominous refuge for those who have fallen between the cracks, where people can be "robbed at gunpoint by three guys who pulled up alongside them in a Volvo." In "Tagging," a middle-aged ex-hippie couple on the verge of divorce move into a swankier neighborhood in North Berkeley, where the neighbors' nosy insolence hastens the decline of their marriage. A young girl in "The Stick," a gentle coming-of-age story, awakens to her own sexuality in an innocent, teasing encounter with a boy she has known since birth. Frym focuses on sensitive social issues, and when she avoids polemics, her politically charged narratives are among her best. " 'To See Her in Sunlight Was to See Marxism Die' " wittily equates communism and the end of a marriage. The title story, in contrast, leans toward preachy heavy-handedness, as an unemployed immigrant's exuberant inner life is stifled by an interview with an indifferent bureaucrat. Frym's prose reveals her roots in poetry (she has published three books of verse), and her stories are sometimes more suggestive than substantial. But the collection never shies away from difficult realities. In its certainty that "a person can't go about their own business without disturbing the social order," it expresses the essence of engaged lives. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A second helping of stories from Frym (How I Learned, 1992), who offers us a rather deadpan look at the vivid lives that are carried on in Berkeley and points north. Most of the main characters in these 24 pieces are just old enough to have mastered the habits of regret, but too young to give themselves wholly over to the cynicism of the disappointed romantic. And disappointed they are, as much in the world as in themselves. The unhappy couple of To See Her in Sunlight Was to See Marxism Die see in the fall of Soviet Communismwhich had once been their hope for the futurea reflection of the slow and inexorable collapse of their own marriage (By the time Russia was only Russia again, idealism, not to mention romance, was in an international decline. Others see their own advance in the world as a sign of their lost ideals, like the upwardly mobile couple of Tagging who find that they have less and less to say to each other once they move into a prosperous neighborhood. Theres a certain fascination with the deceptively innocent world of children: Canticle is an oddly elegiac portrait of a lonely girl at a birthday party, while No Clubs Allowed depicts the unspoken tensions that arise when a middle-class white girl tries to become the friend of her inner-city black classmate. Some of the works are portraits rather than narratives, such as Loosestrife (a woman watches her neighbors marriage collapse and worries about her own) or Man (a wife describes her unsatisfactory husband in acid detail). The title story is a modest lament in which an unemployed fisherman who works as a museum guard while trying to discover his own vocation. Quiet and moving in their intensity of feeling, Fryms tales are nevertheless a bit too modest for their own good. A larger work with a clearer focus and stronger sense of direction would have better suited her very considerable talents. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872863581
• ISBN 13: 9780872863583
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176