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Katherine Shonk

Författare till Happy Now?

3+ verk 100 medlemmar 3 recensioner

Om författaren

Katherine Shonk was born in Chicago and lives in Evanston, Illinois. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and The Georgia Review, and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories

Verk av Katherine Shonk

Associerade verk

En dag i Ivan Denisovitjs liv (1962) — Inledning, vissa utgåvor12,873 exemplar
The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001) — Bidragsgivare — 543 exemplar
Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader (2003) — Bidragsgivare — 50 exemplar

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This was a very good read; I would like to read more from this author; I would even be interested in a sequel to this book. I appreciated how the author maintained tension even though the main action occurs before the book starts. What struck me most from this book was the irony of how suicide may seem like the absolute act of control -- except once you're dead, your control is gone. The husband was such a control freak that he had a tabbed notebook of directions for his wife to find after his suicide -- did he ever consider that once he's dead, he's not in control anymore? His suicide notebook will be passed around and read by various members of his family? His wife will move on? By the end of the book, the world has swallowed the hole he left behind and he is just gone: Happy Now?… (mer)
 
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read.to.live | 1 annan recension | Jun 6, 2011 |
These stories are set in 1990's Russia when the culture is beset by Westernization. The author treats her characters (American and Russian) with compassion even as she looks hard at their faults and idiosyncrasies. Some of the stories are poignant, but there's a strain of humor throughout. Her writing is so original and insightful; certain phrases took my breath away, they were so perfect. I loved this book. I believe Ms. Shonk wrote the forward to the new translation of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," underscoring her insight into Russian culture in transition.… (mer)
 
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bshonk | Mar 4, 2007 |
No question, Shonk has it as a novelist
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April 18, 2010
BY HEDY WEISS Sun-Times Theater Critic
In her first book, The Red Passport, Chicago writer Katherine Shonk gave us a collection of sharply observed, often bittersweet short stories about Russians (and visiting Americans) who were trying to make some sense of the seismic shifts that were part of post-Communist life in the 1990s.
Now, seven years later, Shonk’s first novel has arrived, and though her story unfolds much closer to home (primarily in Chicago and Evanston), her distinctive voice — the ironic, self-mocking sense of humor, the flair for capturing the ache of imperfect romantic love, the observation of quirky behavioral details, the starchy appraisal of flawed character, the telling sense of family dynamics — is once again on display.
In Happy Now? Shonk spins a tale of love, grief, guilt and suppressed anger as she homes in on Claire Kessler, a thirtysomething artist, builder of dollhouses and part-time “home stager” whose marriage of less than two years comes to a stunningly unexpected end when her husband, Jay Blaisdale, an academic psychologist researching child behavior, jumps to his death from a high-rise balcony.
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LOCAL APPEARANCES
Katherine Shonk will read from and sign copies of Happy Now? at:
* 7:30 p.m. April 21 at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark.
* 6 p.m. April 29 at Barnes & Noble DePaul, 1 E. Jackson.
(Photo by Michael Rastall)

On the surface, such a story might seem like fodder for a Lifetime television network drama or a women’s magazine story. But Shonk (the sort of writer Saul Bellow might have dubbed “a first-class noticer”) makes gold of it — invariably stripping away sentimentality and replacing it with the mix of caustic intelligence and biting wit of someone who feels things deeply but never loses the ability to step back a bit and see the dysfunctional theater of it all.
And when it comes to profoundly private devastation, she can conjure that, too — whether in the form of a saved cell phone message from her husband that she believes recorded his final heartbeats, or the devoted vigil of her adoring and worried father, who watches her every move from his car during the weeks after Jay’s suicide.
Shonk also plays deftly with the timing of her revelations — moving backward and forward to parse out bits of information about the story’s central relationship (its gentle pleasures, its pervasive little aches, its unspoken tensions), as well as the flawed intimacies of many of her other characters, including the memorable cat her husband left behind.
The daughter of parents who divorced almost too civilly when she and her younger sister, Nomie (now married and pregnant), were still in grade school, Claire was something of a contented loner before she met Jay, though she was not beyond signing up with eHarmony. (The hilarious freak-show parade of dating stories here are laugh-out-loud funny: “At a friend’s party a man flirted with her and asked her out, but he rushed through their first date and shook her hand at the end of it, only to show up the next week at her group art show with his mother, who bought a work from someone else.”)
Jay, of course, was different. She gently picked him up while sitting in a cafe and overhearing him ask the manager about a long-defunct record store she knew. He had his first attack of depression before they wed and another profound bout during their honeymoon in Hawaii. He began seeing a therapist. Yet what began to seem predictable but manageable to Claire — they had bought a house and she was even thinking about a baby — was perhaps more than she was able or willing to fully face.
Was Claire oblivious, or detached, or incapable of complete intimacy? Or was Jay simply determined to end things in the most radical, perhaps even selfish way? And did the meticulously prepared binder he left behind for her (full of practical information, as well as a suicide note) provide the best indication of who he really was?
Shonk is not one to deliver easy answers. After all, the title of her book ends with a question mark.
… (mer)
 
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bshonk | 1 annan recension | Apr 19, 2010 |

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Statistik

Verk
3
Även av
3
Medlemmar
100
Popularitet
#190,120
Betyg
4.0
Recensioner
3
ISBN
6
Språk
1

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