A Hole in the Language (Iowa Short Fiction Award) - Hardcover

Swick, Marly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877452962 ISBN 13: 9780877452966

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1990

Synopsis

Book by Swick, Marly

About this title

About the Author:

Marly Swick's books include A Hole in the Language, Paper Wings, and The Evening News. She teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

From Publishers Weekly:

The 1990 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning stories in this debut collection calibrate loss and mourning. Families disintegrate: children are killed; husbands desert wives; mothers already maddened by grief can no longer care for their children and must relinquish them. Women succumb to cancer and undergo mastectomies; others, apparently intact, know that something fundamental is missing in their lives. Swick's narrators, who range from schoolchildren to backwater spinsters and college professors, face down tragedy with a toughness conveyed with deadpan wit and grace. When in "Heart" a concerned aunt talks about a niece's report from the school psychologist, her husband tells her, "Don't fill her head up with all that psychiatrist talk. . . She got troubles enough already"). In "Eating Alone," a widow mourns the recent death of her sister, Delphine, "until it occurred to me that maybe my husband and Delphine were together somewhere, some otherworld disco, dancing up a storm. Even dead, Delphine was probably more of live wire than I ever was." In these 10 tales, Swick apportions weal and woe so evenly that it's hard to know whether to cheer or cry.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0877452962
• ISBN 13: 9780877452966
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204