The Big Ear: Stories - Hardcover

Hemley, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0895871289 ISBN 13: 9780895871282

Publisher: John F Blair Pub, 1995

Synopsis

Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 1995 first edition. Blair. Hardcover. Fine in Near Fine dj. **Signed by the author on titlepage.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Clever, confident and, at times, even poignant, this collection by the author of The Last Studebaker succeeds by showing ordinary, middle-class people in pursuit of everyday desires. In "A Printer's Tale," a young editor slips his girlfriend's poems into a national magazine and then stands bewildered as his effort backfires on their relationship. In "Independence Boulevard," a man finds that his longtime friend has matured, but in a way that troubles him. And in the title story, perhaps the collection's best, a teenage boy searches tentatively for a connection with one of his mother's college students. Certain surrealistic tales, such as "The Last Customer" and "An Intruder," are slightly jarring in the midst of Hemley's otherwise realistic representations. But the stories generally mix well in tone and style. If Hemley has a consistent fault, it's that his writing is more accomplished on the level of sentence and scene than on structure; he tends to end too quickly, rushing toward a pointed last sentence before having allowed a tale to generate its full resonance. Yet the collection abounds with intriguing situations, skillfully rendered.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hemley, whose last fictive outing was a deft, quirky novel with a hung ending (The Last Studebaker, LJ 9/15/92), seems never to view life straight on. The result is a just-off-center universe where the unusual is allowed to be, or seem, usual?a universe like Lawrence Naumoff's, for example. The 16 stories here range from the retrospective title story about a boy, his mother's poetry group, and a mail-order listening device, to one involving the courtship of Daniel Boone and Shirley Temple (from a support group for people with?what else??famous names), to a four-page visit to the queen's bedroom as she encounters a (very) unexpected intruder, to a story involving a date even more disastrous than its setting?the end of the world. Hemley's mix of offbeat circumstance, sharp characterization, and fluid writing will appeal to more sophisticated fiction readers. Recommended.?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: John F Blair Pub
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0895871289
• ISBN 13: 9780895871282
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 203