Annihilating Distance: Selected Stories - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Whether from next door or from history, these characters come right at you. In thirteen thrilling stories, circumstance forces them to decide what they most believe in and how they will behave--and to confront the implications. Deeply imaginative and passionate, the stories combine the excitement and pleasure of popular novels with the subtlety and seriousness of literary fiction. SELECTIONS. [from REBELS:] As she came around the car he leaned over to open the door, leaned over again to lock it once she was inside, his arm across her like a safety bar, and stared at her, stared at her face, from that close. He stared at her eyes, into her eyes, at her eyebrows and eyelashes, at her cheeks, her lips, her hair, his face blank, like you would examine a photograph of someone interesting. Was she interesting, this unflinching unblinking let-me-know-when-you re-through teenager, her face smeared so thick her make-up made a mask, her lips made large with red, her eyes with black? [from STRANGERS:] After they had clinked glasses and tested the first sip, he turned away. I like your friends, he mumbled, but I barely know them. They re so young. They re as old as I am. That s what I mean, he said turning back. She took his glass away and put it and hers on the table. We re lovers, she whispered, fixing his eyes. Lovers have no age. [from ZOLA, A FICTION:] Zola sits, suspended in time and place, unaware as yet that he has been struck by flying glass and is bleeding. He feels nothing and sees little, though he will claim to remember an intense alertness. His sole specific memory will be that of the face of one of the assailants..., a face profoundly unconscious of itself, contorted... into a mask, a repulsive version of itself. Though in five minutes Zola would be unable to identify the man in a group, he will later confide to Fasquelle that he will carry the vision of that face to his grave. [from TOWARD THE ANNIHILATION OF DISTANCE:] Beyond where the plow had stopped, a four-wheel drive had cut neat tracks into the deep snow on the road, just wide enough for the sled. The child climbed on with wordless excitement and they set off alone into an untouched white world. Before them the road rose several feet, shortening the view, so there were no sweeping vistas. The world was intimate, a silent, a white birth world. The trees, empty of all clutter, took only the snow to their undefended arms. The stranger turned back to the tree to watch the liquid roll off the tap into the bucket. Truly, she felt to her gradually increasing amazement, there was something wonderful about this whole experience. A secret had been discovered. While she had been shivering and cursing at the mud, the earth was silently waking up. Looking at the dripping sap, she suddenly felt the entire woods as something living. For her whole life she could have walked through it or around it and never have... felt part of it. Now here she was, inside looking out, for the first time.

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