Sign-In
Cart
The Man Back There: Stories
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9781932511635
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: Aug 1 2008
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.58 Depth: 8.99
Language: English
In her introduction to The Man Back There, Mary Gaitskill writes simply, I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . . The reader of David Crouse's collection is bound to agree, but the reasons are not easily explained. Crouse crawls inside the heads of a dozen male protagonists and tells us how they think. They are not always likeable. They are often losers--their thoughts hurry ahead or dawdle behind, disconnected from what little action occurs around them.
And yet, somehow, we wince for the dog-catcher who crashes his ex-wife's Thanksgiving dinner in The Castle on the Hill. We sympathize with the latch-key kid who pillages toys in a dead boy's closet in Time Capsule. And in The Long Run, we find it hard to condemn a ninety-two-year-old senator trying to salvage his career after his ex-wife publishes a scandalous tell-all book about his life.
In this deceptively quiet collection, the truth is something that simmers up through what is not said. A hero is a man who saves himself from himself, who placates his temper with self-awareness and, most importantly, self-forgiveness. The Man Back There is a feat of empathy and razor sharp vision.
David Crouse is the author of Copy Cats, which received the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Fairbanks, where he teaches at the University of Alaska.
Also in
General 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
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback