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If the Heart Is Lean: Stories
Paperback
Series: Yellow Shoe Fiction
Publisher Price: $24.95
ISBN13: 9780807133767
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Sep 1 2008
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In Chestnut Season, a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked beside her; in Boyfriends, the recently deceased protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands; in Mrs. Fargo, a young man faces a reckoning with his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes. The short-short Buoyant introduces Elise, nine months pregnant, as she drifts down the Santa Fe River, trying to jettison her suddenly circumscribed existence. Desperate to impress upon his students the seriousness of life, the professor in Pedagogy' boils his head, discovering in the end a lesson learned too late.
Through compact, tightly woven prose, vivid imagery, and a variety of arresting narrative techniques, If the Heart Is Lean zeroes in on the humorous and painful lives of people who are mysteries to themselves.
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