Susan Straight
Författare till I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
Om författaren
Novelist and short story writer Susan Straight graduated from Amherst College in 1984. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of California in Riverside. Aquaboogie, her first collection of short stories, won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and was one of Publishers Weekly's best visa mer paperbacks (1990). I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots was named one of 1992's best novels by both Publishers Weekly and USA Today. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
Verk av Susan Straight
What It Ain't (in McSweeney's 14 - EGGERS) 1 exemplar
Associerade verk
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Black Clock 8 — Bidragsgivare — 1 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Födelsedag
- 1960-10-19
- Kön
- female
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Födelseort
- Riverside, California, USA
- Bostadsorter
- Riverside, California, USA
Amherst, Massachusetts, USA - Utbildning
- Riverside Community College
University of Southern California
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MFA) - Organisationer
- University of California, Riverside
- Priser och utmärkelser
- Lannan Literary Award (Fiction, 2007)
Robert Kirsch Award (2013)
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
Priser
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Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 19
- Även av
- 24
- Medlemmar
- 1,271
- Popularitet
- #20,174
- Betyg
- 4.0
- Recensioner
- 38
- ISBN
- 69
- Språk
- 3
- Favoritmärkt
- 2
The author brings this rarely written-about territory to a global audience and does so with high fidelity and gusto. So many details, so vividly described: the terrain, the businesses, the cultural conflicts, the styles, the roads and -- offramp by offramp -- the freeways. Most of all, though, the author paints the usually overlooked mix of people and their looks, their preoccupations, their polyglotic lingo, their dreams, their harsh realities.
I say the book is ambitious because it attempts to give voice to more than a dozen different people, women and men, boys and girls, workers and bosses, natives, immigrants, drunks, druggies, strivers, the grounded and the free-floating spirits, the decent, the profane. No easy task. In the first chapters, the voices didn't ring particularly true, especially the men's. Also, the plot is slow to develop, with many of the early pages a bit overburdened by establishing decades-old facts. These facts do become important later on. A finer edit, however, might have laid this groundwork more expeditiously.
Just the same, if you begin this book and feel bogged down at first, persist. Page by page, the plot gathers momentum until its final scene strikes a tremendous punch. It accomplishes this not by an odd twist or some other gimmick, but instead by the slow, steady accretion of feeling as a reader hears the characters speak, understands their experience in the world, and senses a deep sympathy.
Somewhere in the middle of the book I began silently objecting to cardboard portrayals of a few, less savory characters. But one also could find similar fault with many of the world's great novels. "Les Misérables" comes to mind. If no one is going to call Susan Straight a contemporary Victor Hugo, I'll give "Mecca" four stars for its ambition, execution, and huge heart.… (mer)