Almonds to Zhoof
Collected Stories
By Richard Stern
(Triquarterly, Hardcover, 9780810151499, 624pp.)
Publication Date: June 2005
Categories: Short Stories (single author)
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For decades, Richard Stern has been acclaimed as one of the American masters of the short story. Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories brings together for the first time forty-nine of Stern's best short works and novellas-from "Dr. Cahn's Visit," which The New Republic praised as "the very best very short story in the English language," to classics like "Teeth" and "Wanderers."
Stern's stories-witty, moving, always full of energy-never sacrifice storytelling to mere elegance or wandering wisdom. This collection demonstrates Stern's astonishing ability to portray people from all walks of life, their flawed relationships to ideas, their sometimes bizarre relationships with lovers and friends, their often brilliant, if skewed, appraisals of themselves. The stories always reflect an abiding compassion for his characters whoever they are and whatever their origins. All exist within the politics and workplaces and bedrooms of the real world. All are incorrigibly human.
Richard Stern is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. In 1985 he won the Award of Merit for the Novel awarded every six years by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His recent works include Pacific Tremors, published by TriQuarterly Books in 2001, and What Is What Was (Chicago, 2001). New editions of three of his major novels--Natural Shocks, Other Men's Daughters, and Stitch-are also forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern in 2004.
"Stern is a great virtuoso. [I]n an ailing literary culture, we should be grateful for a work like this and a career, too, spanning the American half-century." --<b><i>New York Times Book Review</b></i>
"Like a gifted dancer in a small space, Stern has tremendous grace and ease on the page, executing dynamic turns and dips with a fine economy of motion and without sacrificing nuance. And there's a toughness here, a fighter's willingness to face life's cruelty even as he appreciates its resiliency and pleasures."
--<b>Booklist,</b> starred review
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1Q84 Haruki Murakami Knopf |
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The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus, and Giroux |
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The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Knopf |
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Death Comes to Pemberley PD James Knopf |
