Sign-In
Cart
Holding On: Stories of Furnass
Hardcover
Series: The Books of Furnass, Book 5
Publisher Price: $25.95
ISBN13: 9780999769959
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Published: Nov 15 2019
Pages: 222
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A boy encounters unfamiliar areas in his hometown; witnesses older boys in a sexual encounter; gets caught up in a neighborhood gang crabapple fight--and discovers how attractive and exciting these dangers can be. A trio of young mill workers watches one of their high school friends play in a Super Bowl game and have to confront the comparisons with what they've made of their own lives. The young abused wife of a policeman finds herself the keeper of her paraplegic husband after a car accident and learns that love can take many forms. An old woman rattles through the rooms of her big house late at night and confronts a young intruder in her kitchen. A husband, while knitting a fabric of lies to make time to see his girlfriend, realizes he loves his wife but that the heart has reasons that even the heart doesn't understand.
In the thirteen stories of Holding On we see life in Furnass during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time of prosperity for a Western Pennsylvania mill town, though there are intimations of change, rumors of mill closings, layoffs. Two hundred years earlier in this same area, two Scottish soldiers of the Black Watch, part of Colonel Bouquet's expedition into the uncharted Ohio Territory to retrieve Indian captives, struggle through the virgin forest along the Allehela River looking for lost sheep.
The story of the two Scottish soldiers--their struggle with the limitless unforgiving foreign landscape; conflicting clan loyalties; and the continual threat of attack from Indians--interweaves among the stories of later-day Furnass, creating a collective portrait of people, then and now, as life changes about them, doing their best to hold on.
1 different editions
Also available
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback