Aprašymas
Stunning stories that explore the countless ways we pursue love and occasionally misplace it, or sometimes just let it slip through our fingers.
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In one story, a chance meeting in a Key West bar brings fleeting refuge to two damaged souls. In another, an aging creative writing professor confronts his own loss of self-belief in the face of a student's unmistakable brilliance. The suicide of a childhood friend twenty-five years after childhood is over brings two teenage lovers together for a brief, fragile time. At the heart of the collection, Guralnick transports readers to the smoky rhythm and blues bars, ragged baseball diamonds, bookstores, and book-lined apartments of Boston and Cambridge in the 1950s and '60s. Three stories follow Danny, a young boy growing up in a second-and-third-generation family that is confident in the promise of assimilation: a grandfather brimming over with positive energy; a father returned from the war to pick up an interrupted life he can't wait to begin; a mother struggling with an increasingly debilitating deafness that threatens to upend her world.
Collectively, these stories evince a heartbroken beauty, shot through with a profound sensitivity to all that can hurt us, all that holds us back, all that makes us human. With this collection Peter Guralnick achieves a new creative high point. As writer Mark Harris (
Bang the Drum Slowly) said of his novel,
Nighthawk Blues, some years ago, "We can all be pleased and grateful that Guralnick came to fiction. We knew he was a comprehensive reporter, and now we know that he is extraordinarily able as a storyteller, too."
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