Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Braiding in fairytales and mythology, Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp is a Midwestern gothic collection of thirteen linked stories in which young attorneys discover what it takes to succeed.

It's the 1980s, the decade of greed, big hair, Dallas-sized shoulder pads, Gordan Gecko, and leveraged buyouts when Cissy Armstrong leaves the not-so-protective cocoon of her dysfunctional family to join Strathy McMahon, a law firm in Toledo, Ohio. Fueled by ambition, she is determined to shed her nice girl, little sister persona. She learns to swear, infiltrate male spaces, and check her morals at the door. Meanwhile, the specter of an ancient swamp burbles underneath the skyscrapers, the sterile city streets, and the surrounding farmland. It's this invisible landscape, the fecund earth, the tangles of roots, sentient nature, and generational DNA that holds the place together, makes careers, and dictates entitlements and the avenues by which women can transcend their prescribed roles and limitations.

In these stories, ambitious men marry frog wives; a mother-daughter duo trap souls in farmhouse windows; a teenager drowns in a sea of corn; an associate obsessed with a client breaks into his house to steal a token of remembrance; a PhD candidate reveals the secrets of the universe and predicts the future while having a threesome with her boyfriend and a tree; a lonely wife falls in love with the Chinese keeper of a giant panda on loan to the Toledo Zoo; and a law student visits a German criminal law museum displaying medieval torture devices that will be brought back into use in 21st Century America. Through the lens of magical feminism, Esquire Ball examines the gray side of ethics, the tyranny of ambition, and the collateral damage left in its wake.