These dazzling short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick house in rural Illinois (‘A House on the Plains’), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (‘Baby Wilson’), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (‘Walter John Harmon’), sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages (‘Jolene: A Life’), and witnessing an FBI special agent at a personal crossroads while he investigates a grave breach of White House Security (‘Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden’).
Comprised in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.
Comprised in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.
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Reviews
** 'Powerfully compact and direct
** 'The exact use of language, allied to an underlying compassion, makes this writer hugely appealing
** 'Though they number just five, each of these masterful short stories lingers in the mind with the weight of a far longer work
** 'The perfect short story is a novel boiled down to a bouillon cube, or perhaps a single drop of water with a world reflected in its surface. These intense, vivid snapshots of the American psyche, by that old wizard, E.L. "ragtime" Doctorow, come close to that platonic ideal ... Doctorow has a deep respect for all his characters, and a genius for finding remarkable things in outwardly unremarkable lives