The King of Limbo and Other Stories (Sewanee Writers' Series) - Hardcover

Harun, Adrianne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585671932 ISBN 13: 9781585671939

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2001

Synopsis

With elegance and precision reminiscent of Alice Munro, and the probing, unsentimental eye for detail of A.M. Homes, Adrianne Harun displays a formidable talent for discovering the meaning in ordinary human suffering.

In stories and styles ranging from the magic realism of "Lukudi", in which Nigerian foreign exchange student Natife -- a recurring character in the collection who adds an outsider's angle on events -- tries to apply his native wisdom to the problems of a friend whose pain he can barely begin to grasp, to the carefully modulated madness of "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus" (winner of the Nelson Algren Award) in which a recluse establishes a link to the outside world by writing angry letters to the editor of his estranged son's small town paper, to the gritty realistic portrait of domestic trauma in the title story, Adrianne Harun again and again displays a unique ability to view the world from a dazzling array of perspectives, and to transcend the facts of everyday situations to attain poetry and truth. In The King of Limbo and Other Stories, Adrianne Harun emerges as a consummate stylist and a writer to watch.

About this title

About the Author

Adrianne Harun's stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Story (as first place winner of Story's annual Short- Short competition). She has been the recipient of a Nelson Algren award and a MacDowell Fellowship.

Reviews

Harun's debut is a disparate collection of delicately crafted, intelligent stories that have gained attention individually, though read together they lack cohesion. The narrator of the title story is a boy named William who has just reluctantly celebrated his sixth birthday in the midst of confusion over his parents' breakup; his dog, Goodwood, found during the spring his parents married, is dying of cancer, and William wants desperately to believe in the wisdom and nobility of the knights in castles he reads about. In the opening story, "Lukudi" (meaning "wealthmagic"), a young Nigerian man, Natife, who appears as William's friend in the title tale, devotes his old world village healing powers to the peer counseling of a disturbed 16-year-old Connecticut girl whom he visits as part of his school's extra credit program. Natife is convinced that "someone was doing juju" on the girl, Ally Reisch, who has "the pink rheumy eyes and frail blondness of an old woman on her way to bone and ash." His gift to her, a lighter given in a joyful impulse, is the instrument of her first and only act of salvation. Harun plays with the reader's expectations, though wisely does not give in to them, best evidenced in a perplexing, brief tale about unexplained human disappearances that won a Story magazine competition, "The Unseen Ear of God." In another gently paced piece, "The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus" (winner of the Nelson Algren Award), an old man who seems destroyed by the death of his beloved wife takes on a startling, tender new persona in letters he writes to a newspaper. The potential that Harun reveals in this collection is immense, though a more tightly focused collection or a novel might showcase her strengths to better effect.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1585671932
• ISBN 13: 9781585671939
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 175