The Near Future - Softcover

Porter, Joe Ashby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885586418 ISBN 13: 9781885586414

Publisher: Turtle Point Press, 2006

Synopsis

"The Near Future is a little jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting—among other things—old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination is of the truly droll sort, and with it he homes very closely in upon the truth—alas."—Richard Ford

Winner of the Academy Award (2004) from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Joe Ashby Porter, a Shakespeare scholar at Duke University, is the author of three short story collections and two novels.

About this title

About the Author:

Winner of the Academy Award (2004) from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Porter is the author of three short story collections: The Kentucky Stories, Lithuania, and Touch Wood (Turtle Point, 2002); two novels: Eelgrass and Resident Aliens; and two nonfiction books on William Shakespeare. He has won Pushcart Prizes, NEA/PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, and fellowships from the NEA.

From Publishers Weekly:

Porter imagines a slightly off-kilter tomorrow in his latest novel (after Touch Wood), about a zany cast of character who shake up a dozy trailer-park retirement village in Manatee, Florida. After five decades of marriage, devoted housewife Lillian Margiotta walks out on her husband Vince, a retired Brooklyn cabby and unrepentant philanderer. Although Vince still hopes to win back Lillian, he goes on a road trip to Key West with a new lady friend, spinster Vola Byrd (a once-powerful but now-impoverished Manhattan realtor), his granddaughter Denise and her boyfriend, Tink, the latter a pair of smart-mouthed grifters hoping to strike it rich with a pyramid scheme. Meanwhile, back in Manatee, Lillian visits with Memphis transplants Brent and Gwen Runkle, who pine for the daughter they haven't seen in years and fret over an "OIDs" epidemic. Porter's intimate depictions of the betrayals and regrets of aging-particularly for women-are moving. But he clouds these flashes of humanity with overly artful prose ("Lillian...blots a fuchsia moue on lilac tissue she then lets eddy through a careless somersault into a receptacle of stiffened lace") and wacky plotting (e.g. an incident with a gun-toting Gertrude Stein at a Hemingway look-alike contest).
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About this edition

• Publisher: Turtle Point Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1885586418
• ISBN 13: 9781885586414
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192