Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction
4 total works
The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.
"Home" is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries. In "The Raft", a ten-year-old boy struggles with the shock of his father's leap from a ninth-floor window of the failed family business. A middle-aged woman invites her widowed mother to move in with her - and then the two of them must fight it out to see which one of them has made the greater "sacrifice". A high school senior, more interested in boys than in fruit flies, uses her genetics project - "Sex-Linked Traits" - to probe the foibles of her own high-strung family. In "Uncle Maggot", a little girl, unwilling to say goodbye at her father's coffin, shocks the mourners with a very odd performance.
Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".
Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".
Jean McGarry has been praised for her "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits" ( New York Times Book Review) and as "a writer who honors the human condition" ( Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a "gifted observer" ( Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measure-and suffused with a hint of the surreal-McGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in "Paris," a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in "Moon, June," a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in "The Secret of His Sleep," a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected.
In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.
In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.
Wampanoag, R.I. - It's the early 1970s and the golden age of the newspaper is drawing to a close. At big city dailies, computers have replaced manual typewriters and linotype machines. Calls from the managing editor to "Remake page one!" or "Stop the presses!" are now distant echoes. But in small-town New England, the "Wampanoag Times" still puts out newspapers the old-fashioned way. For Catherine Gallagher, an ambitious and eager college graduate, it's the perfect place to begin a career as a reporter. Her first stories, however, are not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer prizes. Instead of the city beat, she's assigned to the Woman's Page, where she covers weddings and anniversaries. Then she starts writing stories that ger her noticed, and when she's offered a chance to work at a big-city newspaper, she shrugs off her fear and leaps at the chance. Once there, she finds that there's a price for success. Jean McGarry's latest novel, "Gallagher's Travels", is a fast-paced, vivid tale set against a backdrop of late-breaking stories and colorful newsroom characters.
With knowing insight, McGarry charts the emotional and vocational development of a woman determined to succeed in a profession rife with condescension and sexism. McGarry perfectly captures the rhythms of newspaper life and in Catherine Gallagher has created a character - inspired in part by the newshounds of "The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday" - both thoroughly authentic and wholly engaging.
With knowing insight, McGarry charts the emotional and vocational development of a woman determined to succeed in a profession rife with condescension and sexism. McGarry perfectly captures the rhythms of newspaper life and in Catherine Gallagher has created a character - inspired in part by the newshounds of "The Front Page" and "His Girl Friday" - both thoroughly authentic and wholly engaging.