Signals
New and Selected Stories
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A widely celebrated novelist gives us a generous collection of exhilarating short stories, proving that he is a master of this genre as well. Once again, "he reminds us," wrote The Miami Herald, "that great writing is a timeless art."
After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities--a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what's right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gautreaux channels Flannery O'Connor with a soup on of Elmore Leonard in this collection of stories, many set in Louisiana, most featuring people of Cajun descent sliding down the socioeconomic scale, chasing dreams in a last-ditch effort to escape the nightmare of defeat. The first story, "Idols," sets the tone with the tale of a typewriter repairman who inherits a rundown mansion. He hires a carpenter (one of several Gautreaux characters furnace man, exterminator, piano tuner with a gift for fixing things). This carpenter needs money to pay for removing his tattoos, which his wife calls idols. The home-restoration project stalls when the homeowner runs out of money and the carpenter tattoos. In "Radio Magic," a renovated radio receives stations worldwide, allowing its owner, another doomed dreamer, to listen to old comedy routines broadcast from the Solomon Islands. "Gone to Water" focuses on an old man navigating through a recent oil spill. "Sorry Blood" portrays an 88-year-old who, unable to remember who he is, digs a ditch for the man claiming to be his son. A priest ("Attitude Adjustment"), a Texas car thief ("Easy Pickings"), and a boy from Kentucky ("Died and Gone to Vegas") all seem "a few thimbles shy of a quart." Gautreaux's landscape is watery, his language fluid, his characters stuck in a world where, as one promising orphan puts it, what would be nice and what will happen are usually two different things.
