Head: Stories [Hardcover]

In "Wet," this anxiety-prone collection's fine lead story, two teenage brothers struggle against nature and their overbearing stepfather in an odd, real estate-grabbing task: stretching barbed wire across a portion of Florida lake as a lightning storm sets in. Inauspicious as this scenario may seem for exploring troubled family dynamics or the acid reflux of fear, Tester (Darling) escalates the narrator's hungover awkwardness, his older brother Jim's competitiveness and their stepfather Lloyd's bullying to a fever pitch as their pointless labor becomes a struggle for power and survival. Some of the better stories here recount earlier incidents in this Florida cracker family album. "Cousins" features narrator Nim and Jim's adolescent competition for a pretty cousin, and the quietly sad "Floridita" evokes a unique mood and tone as the children listen to their father's tape-recorded letters from Vietnam, even as they know their mother is leaving him for Lloyd. Elsewhere, Tester's successful experiments in everyday dread include the linked stories of a night on the town for aimless New York singles ("Where the Dark Ended") and an existentially difficult stint at the office ("Bad Day"). Sometimes, though, stories like "The Living and the Dead," featuring a college dropout's hitchhiking and hustling tour of Italy, have the air of retrograde minimalism, with the hallmark of an affectless and slightly inarticulate mind game. Yet, overall, this work from Head, who won the 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, shows a strong new talent on the rise. The book's bizarre cover, depicting a man with a hat made from a plastic jug, may please or repel browsers in equal measure, but it will get their attention. Agent, Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Most of the stories in this collection, which won the 1999 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, have appeared separately in such wellknown journals as Esquire, Fiction, and StoryQuarterly. Together, they form something of a story cycle, focusing on a farm-boy's childhood and young adulthood in rural Florida and later New York City. Particularly evident here are a clipped, figurative language and the narrator's emotional surges of fear and a desire for intimate knowledge. In "Wet," he and his brother have been taken by their overbearing stepfather, Lloyd, to lay fence around a swamp in the midst of a coming thunderstorm, their rising fear straining to assert itself: "Okay now, Lloyd, it is lightening us." In "Where the Dark Ended," after being too timid to pursue a woman who "went in me, way up inside of my mind," he is, while drugged up, suddenly drawn by the Statue of Liberty. "I had to go up inside her. It was clear to me. I had to climb up inside that idea," which is a sequence that ultimately compels him to something more "real." James O'Laughlin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Sometimes amusing, often disturbing, always haunting, the stories of Head are also somehow new. -- Richmond Times-Dispatch

This is a beautifully written book. -- The New York Times Book Review

Head is the thirty-first title to be published by Sarabande Books, a nonprofit literary press headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Since the 1996 debut of the press, Sarabande Books titles have received positive review attention from nationally distinguished media including The New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, American Book Review, Small Press, The Nation, and Library Journal.

“Human beings speak of stories and novels as being ‘plot-driven,’ or, say, ‘voice driven.’ If anything, Tester’s stories are fear-driven. ‘Am I ever as scared as then? Back then I was made out of insects, which threatened to anytime take off and fly’ (“Where the Dark Ended”). There is, in these stories, fear of women—each jittery flirtation an agony of nervous desire—fear of a cruel stepfather who routinely endangers his stepsons, fear of one’s prospects. There is fear of the very act of speech, given the narrator’s ruinous stutter. Yet it is the resulting clumsiness—the missteps, the need so great—that seduces us in ways some smooth operator could not.”

—From the Foreword by Amy Hempel
"Head is a collection of stories that is tight, magnificently crafted, a collection that bears the mark of a master's hand. If you only buy one book this year, buy Head. It will leave an indelible imprint on your mind memory and heart."

--Harry Crews "Those heartbeats you hear through your pillow? These are those stories. Stories so close they hold you in utter captivity. Head is a terrific collection. William Tester is an original."

--Leon Rooke

William Tester is a native of Charleston and North Florida, and is the author of the novel, Darling, published by Alfred A. Knopf (1992). He has degrees from Syracuse and Columbia Universities, and is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction, the Hob Broun Prize, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, VA.