This volume of short stories addresses a range of subjects that reaches far beyond the failed relationships and unfulfilled lives that occupy so much fiction today. Shifting among traditions from Borges and Calvino to Cheever and Wolff, these provocative works explore morality in everyday life.
Read More
This volume of short stories addresses a range of subjects that reaches far beyond the failed relationships and unfulfilled lives that occupy so much fiction today. Shifting among traditions from Borges and Calvino to Cheever and Wolff, these provocative works explore morality in everyday life.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very Good. 2nd printing, Ecco hardcover w/ DJ, 2001. Book is VG+, w/ clean text, tight binding. DJ is VG to VG+, w/ light edge/shelf wear. Free delivery confirmation.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Fine in very good dust jacket. light shelfwear. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 192 p. Audience: General/trade. This brilliant debut collection of stories by O. Henry Award winner John Biguenet is as notable for the rigor of its intellect as for the sweep of its imagination. Whether recounting the predicament of an atheistic stigmatic in "The Vulgar Soul" or a medieval torturer who must employ his terrible skills upon his own apprentice in the title tale, these stories decline to settle for ready sentiments or easy assurances. Rather than add to the massive canon of the victimized, for example, "My Slave" takes the perspective of the victimizer. In "The Open Curtain, " a man achieves intimacy with his family only when he recognizes--watching them dine as he sits in his car at the curb--that he lives in a household of strangers. Menaced by a gang of skinheads in a Jewish cemetery, an American tourist in Germany placates the Neo-Nazis with a formula he continues to repeat even after he is safely back home in "I Am Not a Jew." And as for love, it makes demands in such stories as "Do Me" that shake our very notions of what it means to love. If these stories engage the world in sometimes shocking ways, they are virtuoso engagements, eloquent in their prose, surprising in their plotting, sly in their humor. Biguenet shifts among voices and narrative strategies and imposes neither a single style nor a repeated structure as he depicts the ecological catastrophe of "A Plague of Toads, " the problem posed by a ghost in the nursery in "Fatherhood, " and the ghastly discovery a grieving widower defends as "another kind of memory" in "Rose." Such mastery of craft may come as a surprise in a first-time author, but even more impressive is the object of his art. For whether it seeks to prick or to tickle, each story in The Torturer's Apprentice addresses its subject with an authority unusual in contemporary literature as it entices the reader beyond the boundaries of the expected and the accepted.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Supports Goodwill of Silicon Valley job training programs. The cover and pages are in Good condition! Any other included accessories are also in Good condition showing use. Use can included some highlighting and writing page and cover creases as well as other types visible wear.
