(I was lucky enough to read this book in galleys. If I can do what she did there, once, ever, that will be enough. My favorite story is "My Jockey," and I've read it probably 100 times. I keep reading her, trying to get closer to the Lucia ideal, though I never will. She had that uncanny ability in life, and spilled it seemingly effortlessly onto the page.)įifteen years later, when I published Columbine, you can witness my attempt to emulate Lucia on every page. (Of course those are the same-or the latter came from the former. Lucia had an extraordinary ability to gaze right inside of people, sort of an emotional x-ray vision, with the people in her lives and her characters. They are immediately engaging, with that voice, that draws you in with its candor as well as its insight. Just raw, gripping tales about switchboard operators, cleaning ladies and shy little Protestant girls trying to fit in in Catholic school. But no boring MFA stories full of pretty sentences about nothing, either. No grand sweeping anything, no boisterous narrator, showing off. No kings or dukes or ladies in waiting losing their heads or fighting for the crown. Lucia was one of several wonderful profs I had there, but it was her stories alone that I read, with awe, and said, "THAT is what I want to do!" I first read most of them in 1984, when I went to grad school in writing at U of Colorado in Boulder. My foundation as a writer was shaped by these stories. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985.
One of her most memorable achievements was the stunning one-page story "My Jockey," which captured a world, a moment and a panoramic movement in five quick paragraphs. She has also been widely compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates. She aspired to Chekhov's objectivity and refusal to judge. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow’s little magazine The Noble Savage.īerlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories, So Long: Stories 1987-92 and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98.īerlin was never a bestseller, but was widely influential within the literary community. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn.
0 kommentar(er)
