Writers Harvest, 2: A Collection of New Fiction [Paperback]

Family tragedy, romance and other, more mundane daily routines are the subjects of the stories in this collection edited by the author of The Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief. A wide assortment of well-known writers, such as Michael Chabon, Gary Krist, Julia Alvarez, Henry Roth and Frederick Barthelme have contributed stories to benefit the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength. Perhaps because the writers were mindful of their cause, the stories range from moving to incredibly sad in their depiction of everyday humanity. Physical suffering and illness are themes in many of the stories, from the intense physical discomfort of a kidney stone, so perfectly described in "The Stone" by Louis B. Jones to a cancer patient struggling to maintain his dignity in Henry H. Roth's "This Time." Several stories will be especially poignant for parents. In Jill McCorkle's "Life Prerecorded," the narrator sneaks cigarettes throughout her pregnancy, all the while having nightmares about her unborn child. In one of the most appealing stories, Krist's "Sleep," a stock trader holds his infant daughter while maneuvering through a series of late-night telephone calls about an impending market crash. Excellent in its particulars and in its generalities, this deserves to be received well.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"People love stories," novelist Canin notes in his preface to this latest anthology benefiting Share Our Strength, the nonprofit group that has for more than a decade used creative fund-raising approaches to support literacy and fight hunger and homelessness. And our love for stories matters, Canin maintains, because "the urge to hear a story--to gain access to turning points in another person's life--is the same urge . . . that might bring us as a culture to keep caring for our members in trouble." The collection's 18 distinguished authors include: Julia Alvarez, Frederick Barthelme, Po Bronson, Michael Chabon, Susan Dodd, Alice Fulton, Mary Gaitskill, Louis B. Jones, Gary Krist, Jill McCorkle, Henry H. Roth, George Singleton, and Melanie Rae Thon. In varied voices, the stories in Writers Harvest 2 examine aspects of the human condition, birth and death, love and loss, memory and hope, empathy and alienation. A meaty selection of previously unpublished short fiction and an invitation to exercise one's own empathy: in Canin's words, "one of the true necessities of civilization." Mary Carroll

It may seem misanthropic to criticize a collection in which all 18 stories were donated to benefit Share Our Strength, an anti- hunger group. But charity shouldn't be a cover for bad writing, and this hodgepodge has more than its share of sloppy work. The tales reflect a common intent, the exploration of domestic life in all its messiness, returning again and again to the effort to define the meaning of ``home.'' Melanie Rae Thon's ``The Snow Thief'' focuses on an unhappy, childless woman, keeping a deathwatch for her father and looking back over her life; Po Bronson's ``The Impossible to Kill Me Game'' explores a fatherless young boy's fear of abandonment surfacing as his mother takes up with a new man. In Gary Krist's facile ``Sleep,'' an anxious broker in international finance chooses family over the incessant late- night calls from London. And in Louis B. Jones's clever ``Stone,'' a married man's focus on passing a kidney stone allows him to ignore everything else in his life crumbling around him. Judith Freeman revisits the muted world of her Mormon parents in ``Ofelia Rodriguez,'' the story of their unexpected daughter-in-law and grandchild. There are singularly amateurish stories by the poet Alice Fulton and newcomer Heidi Julavits: The first is a clumsy tale of Irish-Catholic spinster aunts, the second a confusing attempt at a cinematic-style chronicle about a distracted, impotent anthropologist, his suicidal wife, and the crew that chooses to film her death rather than save her. Robert Phillips's ``News About People You Know,'' tracing the inadvertent consequences of a social column in a small-town newspaper, stands out for its simple narrative virtues. Despite the claim that this is a collection of previously unpublished stories, at least two pieces (Frederick Barthelme's ``Dallas'' and Louis B. Jones's ``The Stone'') have appeared, in different versions, in print before. The consolation for this decidedly mixed collection: Your money goes to a good cause. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A bountiful collection of previously unpublished stories-by Julia Alvarez, Frederick Barthelme, Michael Chabon, Alice Fulton, Mary Gaitskill, David Haynes, Gary Krist, Jill McCorkle, Melanie Rae Thon, and ten others-whose royalties benefit Share Our Strengths antihunger programs.

Ethan Andrew Canin (born July 19, 1960) is an American author, educator, and physician. He is a member of the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Cain was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan while his parents were vacationing from Iowa City, where his father taught violin at the University of Iowa. He and his family moved around the midwestern and northeastern United States, and eventually settled in San Francisco, California where he attended Town School and later graduated from San Francisco University High School. He attended Stanford University and earned an undergraduate degree in English. Returning to the University of Iowa, Canin entered the Iowa Writers' Workshop, receiving an MFA in 1984 and went on to attend Harvard Medical School where he earned an M.D. in 1991.

Beginning his medical practice with a residency at the University of California San Francisco, he pursued both medicine and writing for several years, leaving medicine in 1998 to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he still teaches. He is a co-founder of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.