Click here for our
|
Fire Ants and Other Stories NewSouth Books In this collection of stories—ranging in locale from the marshes and pine barrens of East Texas to the row houses of Baltimore, and in time from the Civil War to the present day—Gerald Duff conjures up portraits of people suffering from the condition defined by a character in the prizewinning title story, “Fire Ants.” “Does it burn when the fire ants bite?” he says. “Everywhere it stings, a piece of you swells up and rots out.” Captive to a private delusion and bound to a vision of what might be or might have been, each character struggles for escape and redemption. Two children conspire to find a way around a madman, a middle-aged loner kidnaps a cheerleader to watch her dance, a blind man revisits how he lost his sight and found his way in a seaport bordello, a mother trades her body to raise her son’s bail, and a ruined songwriter tries to convince himself that he still believes in Memphis. Highly comic and deeply serious, the tales Duff gives us trace precisely a conflicted terrain of love, hate, and family.
Reviews “These stories are richly observed, keen-witted and tellingly sympathetic to a wide range of characters, from a Texas whorehouse customer getting stabbed in the temple to a young woman imagined in the act of imagining herself someone else.” “Gerald Duff’s latest collection is the work of a master storyteller. Working in a great tradition from Twain to Faulkner and beyond, Duff crumples a reader with laughter, even as we know we are glimpsing deep truths about ourselves as strange human beings.” “Duff’s Fire Ants compares to the work of the old masters because the material of it is the material of life: ordinary speech, ordinary activity, recognizable to all, and yet in Duff’s hands these become eternal art. The dialogue is the surest proof of Duff’s mastery.” “Gerald Duff’s great characters are all astonishing storytellers, with true and compelling voices that will ring in my head forever. Fire Ants is an American classic.” “[Gerald Duff] . . . is a worthy successor to Flannery O’Connor’s dark Southern grotesques. He tells us more about ourselves than we generally acknowledge and goes beyond our fierce independence to the darker truths.”
Links Visit Gerald Duff’s Web site at http://geraldduff.com/. Also by Gerald Duff:
|
