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Reviews
Reviews
McGarry continues to explore the voids between men and women, and between the life of the imagination and the compromises of daily life...McGarry draws on regional detail, literary history, and the pleasures and disappointments of the intellectual life as she examines existential angst with frank wit and solipsistic wisdom. In Dream Date, she plays with His and Hers points of view within realistic narratives or dreamlike fantasy... At her best, McGarry illuminates our quirky, flawed selves and neighbors, and makes us nod even as we sigh.
A knockout fourth collection of wonderfully honed, superbly quirky tales exploring the modern-day crises of relationship-weary men and women. McGarry is equally comfortable in the voices of men and women, and it's hard to find a weak link among these 13 stories... When she's at her strongest, McGarry's prose is fresh, her plots unpredictable, and her dialogue shimmeringly wry... Many of the stories here appeared in small literary or academic publications. They deserve wider circulation. Reading McGarry's stories is to be surprised and delighted.
The reader is catapulted into intensely woven dramas, tightly constructed riffs on the state of affairs 'twixt man and woman. Five are His; eight are Hers; all are captivating glimpses into that awkward and often uncharted territory between the sexes, in which we hoard private moments for ourselves, yet, which if displayed in public, others interpret, searching for hidden clues to help them decipher the relationship... Each story instantly attracts with a seductive energy and authenticity, then just as quickly, McGarry will segue into a subtle sea change, altering mood and tension to lend a dreamlike quality to each tale, throwing the reader slightly off balance yet begging for more.
Readers looking for warmth and tenderness had best look elsewhere; the pleasures of these fictions come from McGarry's wit and intelligence as she casts a cold, subversive eye on her characters' dreams and on their, and our, realities.
'Dream Date,' Jean McGarry's sixth book, contains stories that demand adjectives: delicate, complex, rich, surprising, artful, intellectual, frightening, surreal, powerful.
I have always loved Jean McGarry's books for their acuteness and generosity—an unusual combination. And I've been waiting impatiently for new work and here it is; surprising in its riskiness, humor, and smart as ever.
At the conclusion of each of Jean McGarry's marvelous stories, the reader is faced with a delightful dilemma: to go back to the beginning and read it again, or to begin the next. The precision and complexity of each tale invite rereading. But each story's inventiveness, its droll wisdom, makes us look forward to discovering just what Ms. McGarry will come up with next.
Jean McGarry's stories are stylistic riffs, surprising in every sentence—and those sentences, lively and comic, go deep. She's a real virtuoso.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5
x 8
Pages
248
ISBN
9780801869372
Table of Contents
HIS
Among the Philistines
The Thin Man
Landing
The Secret of His Sleep
HERS
Body and Soul
The Maestro
Moon, June
Better Than Real
Partly Him
Lavare
Paris
The Last Time
Acknowledgments
Featured Contributor
Jean McGarry
Jean McGarry teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Ocean State is her eighth book of fiction. Dream Date, Gallagher’s Travels, Home at Last, The Very Rich Hours, and Airs of Providence have also been published by Johns Hopkins. Her short stories have appeared in, among other publications, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Boulevard, and The Southwest Review.Resources
