What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Jacobsen, Ms. Josephine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801854555 ISBN 13: 9780801854552

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

"Josephine Jacobsen gives us a startling word-by-word gift. Her characters -- human and animal -- know edginess and exhilaration. She is unfoolable. Her judgment is lyric, wise, and daring. She looks all around, her angle of vision invariably original, able to switch from the periscopic to the circumferential."--The 1995 National Book Awards

The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies."

Praise for Josephine Jacobsen:

"Unlike the predominant shrillness, vagueness, or opacity of the contemporary scene, Josephine Jacobsen's work is marked by its reserve, stoic timbre, and its high precision."--Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky

"Josephine Jacobsen writes masterfully, consistently, and better every year. She has a superb narrative gift and she sketches the people of her world with originality, inventiveness, and rare intelligence."--Nation

About this title

About the Author

Josephine Jacobsen has written seven books of poetry, two works of criticism, and three collections of short fiction. From 1971 to 1973 she served two terms as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a post recently retitled National Poet Laureate. Her many awards include a 1994 Academy of the Arts citation; the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for service to poetry; and the selection of On the Island: Short Stories as one of the five nominees for the PEN-Faulkner fiction award. Other honors include a recent award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and eight inclusions of her storiesin the O. Henry Prize Stories.

Reviews

Jacobsen-an octogenarian former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (before the post was re-christened National Poet Laureate)-has also made significant contributions to the art of fiction-writing. These 30 short stories, all previously published, are small, highly polished gems often set in exotic locales like the Caribbean, Morocco or Guatemala. "The Inner Path" concerns an American journalist who loses his way on a country path in the Central American highlands and experiences a shocking encounter that will have long-term consequences. The untraditional family unit of "The Mango Community" is threatened by the political instability on the Caribbean island they've chosen to live on for a year. Because Jacobsen writes with a poet's sensibility, she's less concerned with the polemical contours of political facts than with the effects, great and small, those facts have on individuals. Other stories benefit from an appealingly comic tone. In "Nel Bagno," a woman about to go on vacation gets hopelessly trapped in her bathroom and discovers a wealth of gallows humor she didn't realize she had. Jacobsen's language is clear and filled with vivid images and quiet rhythms: a European in Morocco "looked as though he had had his blood painlessly extracted and then been sealed again"; as a hysterical housewife drives away from her home, "the trees parted, parted, parted before her and in a soft cloud on either side rose the dust." Although many of the stories have lullingly similar shapes, the characters are sharply realized and the situations they find themselves in are startling and evocative.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Perhaps best known for her poetry (e.g., In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, Johns Hopkins, 1995), Jacobsen has accomplished in this wonderful collection what Tobias Woolf once said he likes about short stories: "the power, the directness, the unity of impression, the ability they have to conjure up whole worlds in a few pages." These stories are reflective rather than brimming with action, but in each the reader becomes enmeshed in details of other people's lives: the Atlantic City girl who watches her mother's German friend disappear during World War II; an old man who suffers three strokes in "The Company" and sees his world shrink to a bedroom full of memories; a cricket-playing child who suffers permanent injury in "The Mango Community." Throughout, Jacobsen imparts a sense of both mystery and continuity to her characters. Eight of these stories were included in the O. Henry Prize Stories series; all 30 of them will strike the reader in some way. This book will be savored and remembered. Recommended for all short story collections.?Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801854555
• ISBN 13: 9780801854552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320