The Boys' House: New & Selected Stories - Softcover

Heynen, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873514386 ISBN 13: 9780873514385

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002

Synopsis

Chosen as an "Editors' Favorite Books of 2001" by The Bloomsbury Review

These sixty-four sharply honed stories, selected by the author from more than twenty years of work, showcase Jim Heynen's equal mastery of terse, elegant prose and old-style country wit and wisdom. Every tale is an unerring slice from the lives of a group of farm boys, each full of mischief and witness to the world's tiny miracles. They make coat sails to carry them down a frozen road, teach a three-legged dog to shake hands, build a house from the junk grown-ups throw away, but they also rescue pigs from an unexpected blizzard, feed apples to a blind pony, and learn the songs of different birds. Along the way, they encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: the goose lady, the girl at school with six toes, the man who kept cigars in his cap, Spitting Sally, their crazy Uncle Jack, and dozens more. Heynen's stories, as uniquely American as those of Mark Twain or Sherwood Anderson, are ribald fun, but, like all good country tales, they are also filled with surprises and unexpected, deeper implications.

For this book Heynen has written twenty new stories and revised many of those tales originally published in his first two collections, both now unavailable. This retrospective volume serves as a wonderful companion to his much-praised collection, The One-Room Schoolhouse: Stories About the Boys.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Culled mostly from two out-of-print collections, these 65 anecdotes of farm life are like items that might appear in a down-home column in a weekly newspaper. As the introduction notes, they are difficult to classify and even more difficult to assess. A few offer a touch of recognition of the human condition or of some universal truth, but most, perhaps better suited to oral storytelling, fall flat. Some are quite humorous; others, like "The Albino Fox," in which a beautiful anomaly of nature is destroyed for no reason, are sad. A couple, like "The Old Turtle" and "Ducks and Bacon Rind," are tall tales, or at least facsimiles thereof. Many are not for the squeamish: there is some outhouse humor, and stomach-turning cruelty masquerades as humor in "The Man Who Kept Cigars in his Cap" and "Fewer Cats Now," in which the narrator opines that in the old days, "Fifty cats were not too many on the farm. Sixty or seventy, it was all right. They were worth their weight in cream." The boys dropped them from a windmill with makeshift parachutes and "there were so many cats in those days that nobody missed one if it got killed this way. That was before rat poison." As such quotes demonstrate, the writing can be weak. The farmboys of the title are anonymous mischief makers, and other characters (such as Spitting Sally, the dwarf shoe-repairman or the girl with an extra toe) are never more than fleeting curiosities; the overall effect is like watching a dull parade on a hot day. (Aug.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0873514386
• ISBN 13: 9780873514385
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208