Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1214095 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-02
• Released on: 2008-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Allen melds gritty urban life and magical realism in his first collection (after the novel Rails Under My Back). At times, the combination works—in the title story, full of contemporary slang, a character grows wings, but instead of ethereal white feathers, they are dried up and brown and crusty, like some fried chicken wings. In It Shall Be Again, more of a prose poem than a story, characters open their mouths to catch a thick dirty rain of pennies. Some stories lack cohesiveness, and although Allen isn't attempting to write traditional pieces, the stories would benefit from coherency. Even in the weaker entries, though, Allen delivers striking images—two brothers chewing on wads of toilet paper, a scalp that looks like watermelon meat chewed down to the rind. It is these images, rather than particular events or characters, that leave the strongest impressions. Though scattered cultural references and spot-on dialogue root these stories mainly in the present, they have a distinct feeling of being outside of time. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Whiting Award winner Allen’s distinctive and potent debut, the novel Rails under My Back (1999), aligned him with the likes of Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, and his first short story collection is equally powerful. Profoundly interiorized and subtly otherworldly, each tale is electric with the rising tension that proceeds stormy weather; each tale is a veritable boxing match, as characters trapped in impossible situations feint, jab, and retreat. A number of tales are relayed through the questioning mind of various characters named Hatch. Young Hatch watches his mother like a hawk, surmises that his grandmother is a phony, and spies on his brother, Cosmo. There is much to mull over about race, poverty, language, lies, desperation, and liberation as Allen assembles just the right sensuous and psychological details to bring into focus a city resembling Chicago and a brooding southern setting. Extreme cold and heat, family strife, troubles over money and sex, all is in play, all is mysterious, dangerous, and urgent. With pitch-perfect dialogue and centrifugal force, Allen’s stories pull you down into the misery of the daily hustle and spit you out on the lonely crossroads between reality and myth, where the archetypes roam and trust is but a dream. --Donna Seaman

Review

Customer Reviews

These Stories Aren't In a Holding Pattern, They Are Jetting In At Full Speed
This short story collection from the award winning writer Jeffery Renard Allen (/Rails Under My Back/), continues his run of hard hitting stories that refuse to stay within their assigned genres. He adds magic, unexplained occurrences - in /It Shall Be Again/ pennies fall from heaven, and in /Holding Pattern/ a character grows useless wings - but the stories that are "normal" still have magic, but that of language and insight. The language is often that of the inner city, gritty and direct, but not used for shock value, but because this is how it is where these stories were born and raised. Allen is a highly talented writer, and this collection has many stories that will sink into your conscience, returning at unexpected times when something prompts it.