One Thing That Can Save Us (Coffee-To-Go Short-Short Story Series) - Softcover

Silesky, Barry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890209 ISBN 13: 9781566890205

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1994

Synopsis

This remarkable collection of stories uses the everyday stuff of living—daily lust and minor losses, unpaid bills and broken plumbing—as a point of departure for darker inquiry.

A subtle pathos and hidden anguish underlie these stories of an average American life. One Thing That Can Save Us is for everyone who has learned that even “the good life” is inhabited by inevitable failures, sadnesses, and doubt: struggles over money, problems with children, emptiness, ambiguity, ex-spouses, war, injustice, and leaky faucets.

With a wistful yet urgent lyricism and a delightful sense of absurdity, One Thing That Can Save Us continues the Coffee-To-Go Short-Short Story Series with literature that transcends brevity to resonate in the reader’s mind.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Silesky is a Minneapolis-native poet, biographer, and non-fiction writer. He moved to Chicago where he studied for a BA from Northwestern University and an MA from the University of Illinois.

From the Back Cover

This remarkable collection of stories uses the everyday stuff of living - daily lust and minor losses, unpaid bills and broken plumbing - as a point of departure for darker inquiry. A subtle pathos and hidden anguish underlie these stories of an average American life. One Thing That Can Save Us is for everyone who has learned that even "the good life" is inhabited by inevitable failures, sadnesses, and doubts: struggles over money, problems with children, emptiness, ambiguity, ex-spouses, war, injustice, and leaky faucets. With a wistful yet urgent lyricism and a delightful sense of absurdity, One Thing That Can Save Us continues the Coffee-To-Go Short-Short Story Series with literature that transcends brevity to resonate in the reader's mind.

Reviews

Though not for readers who crave action-packed scenes, these well-crafted short-short stories will appeal to the types of busy- busy adults who give the volume its energy. Silesky (Ferlinghetti, 1990) uses these one- to three-page stories (mostly descriptive interpretations of people and moments) to zero in on how the banal and the titillating, the dutiful and the pleasurable, and the automatic and the mysterious coexist. The stories, which are mostly about professional adults with families and children, exist somewhere between fiction and poetry as Silesky pays careful attention to the details of scene while maintaining a penchant for the cryptic and ineffable. By turns, he follows the thoughts of married men with roving eyes (such as a man who is envious of another man, who is coming to his party and claims ``to have slept with over two hundred women''); various couples trying to find time for sex or divorce among kids and house payments (``Kids here forever, not a minute to think a word in the last months to divorce''); and droning workers who daydream of island vacations. Travel, both actual and imagined, is another theme that pops up often as Silesky places characters in various, mainly European, locations, including Paris, London, and Brussels. Though at times the wisdom the characters expound is as banal as the lives they lead, Silesky manages to spend most of his time extracting the odd mix of thoughts and digressions that go with being an adult on the fast track of the rat race. Ideal for those who appreciate literary craft and an eye for detail, but who don't have the time to get caught up in an epic or even a long short story. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890209
• ISBN 13: 9781566890205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128