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These stories are deeply grounded in a particular place and community but will resonate with readers everywhere... Her prose, especially the dialogue, snaps with authentic immediacy... Staten Island Stories concerns ugly times and circumstances, but the people and the stories are beautiful.
Jimenez's contemporary take offers a rare view of New York City's southernmost borough, Staten Island. Though most people's perception of Staten Island might be shaped by headlines, Jimenez labors to show the vibrant communities within it while addressing the racial tensions that placed Staten Island on the map.
Though Jimenez's characteristic wit and directness come through in each piece, the voices themselves remain unique—original and distinct to the human beings whose difficulties they embody.
Without moralizing and through the thorny, everyday lives of Staten Islanders, or at least a particular subset of them, the book addresses in subtle ways the terrors in our society... In these first-person narratives, the reader doesn't just observe, but joins the characters in their search for autonomy and recognition as human beings, a search carried by prose that captures the complexities of inner fears and the outer behaviors that attempt to mask them.
Jimenez's tough but compassionate voice supports us through the struggles of fully human characters living through the problems of addiction, racism, poverty, and neglect.
It's difficult to quantify satisfaction, spiritual or otherwise, and Jimenez's collection demands constant reappraisal of what it means to live well in a world designed to fail. It's sharp, humorous, tragic, and a genuine pleasure to read.
Like the ferry itself, this book sails from Staten Island into the troubled waters of fiction's greatest themes—family, love, death—all with wry humor and a sharp eye for detail. A wonderful debut.
Claire Jimenez writes with tremendous heart, tremendous wit. Each narrative collected in Staten Island Stories zings with sharp humor and heart-squeezing pathos.
Staten Island Stories is a welcome working-class shout into the face of those who would have us believe that the story of any one American is more important than the story of any other. The view from Jimenez's Staten Island Ferry is one all of us should see.
Compulsively readable, hilarious, and true, Claire Jimenez's Staten Island Stories is a wild and wise and vicious pleasure—this book is full of love.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x 8.5
Pages
192
ISBN
9781421434155
Table of Contents
Tale of the Angry Adjunct
What It Is
Great Kills
Eddie and the Dying Fish
The Knight's Tale
Do Now
Underneath the Water You Could Actually Hear Bells
This One Kid Douglass Got Jumped
You Are a Strange
Tale of the Angry Adjunct
What It Is
Great Kills
Eddie and the Dying Fish
The Knight's Tale
Do Now
Underneath the Water You Could Actually Hear Bells
This One Kid Douglass Got Jumped
You Are a Strange Imitation of a Woman
The Grant Writer's Tale
Who Would Break the Dark First
As Luck Would Have It
Acknowledgments
Featured Contributor
Claire Jimenez
A longtime Staten Islander, Claire Jimenez is a PhD student in English with a concentration in ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She received her BA in English from Colby College and her MFA in creative writing from Vanderbilt University. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in BOAAT, New Madrid, Afro-Hispanic Review, Pank, el roommate, The Toast, and The Los Angeles...Resources
