Back in print in this deluxe edition, the former Poet Laureate of the
United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's only collection of short
fiction, now part of the Ecco Art of the Story series.
"Imagine a writer who combines Woody Allen's sense of exaggeration--his
ability to extrapolate situations to their funniest extremes--with the
perspective and self-consciously elegant language of John Updike. That's
right, you'd have a creature who is never very likely to walk the face
of the earth. But Strand, the prize-winning Canadian-born poet and
professor of English at the University of Utah, comes close to that
model. The stories in this first collection, originally printed in
Vogue, The New Yorker, and Michigan Quarterly Review, vary widely.
Yet several of them share a spirit of stubborn determination in the
pursuit of idiosyncratic meanings of happiness. In one story a U.S.
President noted mainly for reading Chekhov to his Cabinet and creating
the 'National Museum of Weather, ' resigns. . . . Another tale is about
a man who says he has been married five times and in love six, with none
of the 11 experiences overlapping. Then there's Stanley R., the killer
poet who murders his parents so he can write a poem about the
experience. . . . . Few writers, though, can manage to make one of man's
favorite pastimes' futile longing seem to be so hilarious, touching and
ultimately admirable as Strand does, in very succinct ways" (People
magazine).
