Final Vinyl Days: And Other Stories - Hardcover

McCorkle, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565122046 ISBN 13: 9781565122048

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1998

Synopsis

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning of new life by visiting with a very old neighbor who's waiting, too, for his own new life. In these and the rest of the nine stories, Jill McCorkle acts on her penchant for taming the outrageous, humanizing the forbidden, and grounding the hilarious.

About this title

About the Author

Jill McCorkle is the author of nine previous books—four story collections and five novels—five of which have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. The recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Prize for Literature, she teaches writing at North Carolina State University and lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Visit her online at www.jillmccorkle.com. 

Reviews

Nine varied, lively, and beguiling stories from the ever-improving author of, most recently, Carolina Moon (1996). If you still think southern fiction is all about decaying antebellum mansions, miscegenation, and disturbing family secrets, you owe it to yourself to read McCorkle. Not that she shuns such mattersit's just that her amiably unstrung characters keep reminding us that, even while psyches and marriages are collapsing, dishes pile up in the sink, and sometimes dirty laundry is, well, just clothes that have to be washed and hung on the line. She's wonderful with beleaguered or comically resourceful women: a pregnant one trying to quit smoking and shape up generally (``Life Prerecorded''); an entrepreneur who markets funerals for ``the soon-to-be deceased'' (``It's a Funeral! RSVP''); and, most memorably, a single mother obsessed with her own and her young son's vulnerability (``A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World''). If McCorkle stumbles with a monologue addressed by a man's mistress to his wife (``Your Husband Is Cheating On Us''), suggesting the two murder him together, she shines when widening her lens to examine (``Paradise'') the seriocomic chemistry between a New York Jew (Adam) and an Atlanta fashion designer (Eve) hung up on ``the North-South thing,'' or a young clergyman's uncertain ministry (``The Anatomy of Man''). She has a deadly eye for endearingly ludicrous detail (weddings and funerals bring out her best), a genius for piquant first-person narration, and a finely tuned ear for the accents of exasperated domesticity (``If Jesus were here he would take that child outside and wear his butt out''). Her stories meander even when they're comparatively tightly plottedbut its always a pleasure staying with them just to hear her people rattle on. The work of an accomplished comic writer whos continually refining her skills and expanding her range. McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565122046
• ISBN 13: 9781565122048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212