The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road: 23 Variations on a Theme

Stamberg, Susan, editor with George Garrett

ISBN 10: 0393030806 / ISBN 13: 9780393030808

Published by Norton NY nd (1992), 1992

About this Item

206pp. 8vo Pictorial blue boards and red cloth back 1st edition so stated. SIGNED by Susan Stamberg. Stories by 23 authors: Stuart Dybek, Richard Bausch, Josephine Humphreys, George Garrett, Mary Lee Settle, Ann Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, Judith Guest, RHW Dillard, Beverly Goodrum, Ron Carlson & others Fine/Fine dj 0-393-03080-6. Seller Inventory # 653080196

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road: ...

Publisher: Norton NY nd (1992)

Publication Date: 1992

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Twenty-three writers, including Mary Lee Settle, Josephine Humphreys, and Madison Smartt Bell, present their responses to a creative exercise, offering their own interpretations of a single theme: a wedding cake in the middle of the road

From Kirkus Reviews:

National Public Radio personality Stamberg, along with novelist Garrett, got the bright idea to have 23 writers--Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Stuart Dybek, and a host of others--work independently of each other on a story that incorporates the title image. The resulting anthology--some of these stories were first read on NPR--is more a novelty item than a worthy dive into contemporary fiction. Dybek's ``I Never Told This to Anyone'' is a touching fabulism about ``a little bride and groom'' who ``would come to visit me at night,'' though it's more self-conscious and mannered than Dybek's better work; Charles Baxter's ``Possum'' is an amusing dialogue story, mostly between a sister and her younger brother; Kelly Cherry's title story is a delicate but all-too-brief prose poem; Bausch's ``Tandolfo, the Great,'' about a clown who loses his cool at a birthday party for a five-year-old, is clever but forced; Beattie's ``Picture Perfect'' is a slight present-tense account that combines Virginia Woolfian lyricism and some notes (one character is a photographer) on perspective. The three most affecting tales--in their own right, not as variations on a theme- -are Al Young's ``The Subliminal Cakewalk Breakdown,'' in which a narrator, forced to leave the California freeway, breaks down at a zany, surreal truck-stop and becomes involved in the lives he finds there; Bell's ``Pawnshop,'' about a narrator at said pawnshop who must deal with a junkie friend and with his own conscience; and Mary Lee Settle's ``Dogs,'' an evocative southern reminiscence. Stamberg tells us she came to this idea after having writers concoct first a chain novel and then a chain mystery. Such ideas make sense to fill air time, but aren't particularly worth memorializing in a gimmicky book like this. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.