Working Men: Stories - Hardcover

Dorris, Michael

3.76

188 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805022961 ISBN 13: 9780805022964

Publisher: Henry Holt, 1993

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A new collection of short fiction by the award-winning author of The Broken Cord presents fourteen incisive stories that bring to life colorful, meticulously detailed characters who speak in a rich variety of voices. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

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About the Author:

Michael Dorris’s adult fiction includes the bestselling A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, The Cloud Chamber, and The Crown of Columbus, co-authored with Louise Erdrich. Among his nonfiction work are The Broken Cord, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Paper Trail, a collection of essays.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fourteen handsomely crafted stories showing sympathy for a broad range of mostly male characters--from stalwart small-town workingmen to a homosexual traveling salesman and an obedient Native American boy on the verge of marriage--by memoirist (The Broken Cord, 1989) and novelist Dorris (coauthor, The Crown of Columbus, 1991; etc.). The voices are as disparate as the characters, though most are echoes of midwestern hills and plains. In ``Earnest Money,'' a Dakotan draft-evader returns home to claim a small legacy from his dead father, but quickly and rashly marries a female drifter, turning the money over to her care. In ``Quiana,'' a henpecked rural snow-plow operator defies his wife and buys a loud shirt at a yard sale--then impulsively ignites an affair with the widow of its previous owner. ``Me and the Girls'' is a comic monologue by a man who's kidnapped two ``abused'' elephants from a zoo. In ``Shining Agate,'' a postgraduate anthropologist is surprised to find he's changed the lives of the mysterious Alaskan natives he's reluctantly gone to study. In the most memorable pieces, the emotional issues are strong and clear: In the opening story, ``The Benchmark,'' an aging architect of ponds remembers the drowning of his beautiful young son, an only child. In ``Groom Service,'' a Native American boy finds himself smitten by his future bride--in spite of the mothers' cynical, funny, but unending manipulations on their behalf. And in the finest story, ``Jeopardy,'' a shrewd and banal pharmaceuticals salesman who woos doctors' receptionists to obtain sales appointments by day and at night picks up fellow salesmen for sex finds through a routine phone call that the only person he loves, his pottering old father, has suddenly died. Crisp, convincing, and often affecting stories of men's lives. (First printing of 50,000) -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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