Fun & Games: Short Fictions [Hardcover]

Clarence Major (Author)

Available from these sellers.

Product Details

Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Holy Cow! Press (Jan 1 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0930100344
ISBN-13: 978-0930100346
Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 14.9 x 1.7 cm
Shipping Weight: 372 g

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

The short fictions collected here by noted black novelist and poet Major ( Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar ) are full of style and substance but light on action. Five sections vary from slight sketches of childhood ("Ten Pecan Pies") to wary, amusing appraisals of romance ("The Vase and the Rose") and stark, political evocations of place and mood employing in freewheeling style the author's impressive poetic gifts ("Mobile Axis: a Triptych"). Impressive if uneven, the collection includes a few standouts in addition to these three: "My Mother and Mitch," a boy's touching account of his mother's tentative relationship with a white man; and "Letters," in which an amorous correspondence between a writer/editor at a black women's magazine and an old girlfriend misfires with painful hilarity.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Major's highly self-reflexive type of fiction has differentiated his work from that of most contemporary black writers. While similar experimental pieces dominate this collection, it also includes a few stories in the realistic style he employed in the recent novel Such Was the Season ( LJ 8/87). In "The Horror!" Major combines the everyday events of an actress's life with the plot of a horror movie she is filming, allowing him to comment on power, race relations, and the nature of fiction. The story "Party with Masks" is a surreal tale that could be the record of a dream, while "Ten Pecan Pies" is a realistic, warmly lyrical depiction of black rural life. Major's work is remarkably free of the pretension and emotional sterility that often mars experimental writ ing. Recommended for most collections.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Product Description