Description
Book SynopsisThese dazzling short works are crafted with all the weight and resonance of the novels for which E. L. Doctorow is famous. You will find yourself set down in a mysterious redbrick house in rural Illinois (''A House on the Plains''), working things out with a baby-kidnapping couple in California (''Baby Wilson''), living on a religious-cult commune in Kansas (''Walter John Harmon''), sharing the heartrending cross-country journey of a young woman navigating her way through three bad marriages (''Jolene: A Life''), and witnessing an FBI special agent at a personal crossroads while he investigates a grave breach of White House Security (''Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden'').
Comprised in a variety of moods and voices, these remarkable portrayals of the American spiritual landscape show a modern master at the height of his powers.
Trade Review** 'The perfect short story is a novel boiled down to a bouillon cube, or perhaps a single drop of water with a world reflected in its surface. These intense, vivid snapshots of the American psyche, by that old wizard, E.L. "ragtime" Doctorow, come close to that platonic ideal ... Doctorow has a deep respect for all his characters, and a genius for finding remarkable things in outwardly unremarkable lives * THE TIMES *
** 'The exact use of language, allied to an underlying compassion, makes this writer hugely appealing * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH *
** 'Powerfully compact and direct * INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY *
** 'Though they number just five, each of these masterful short stories lingers in the mind with the weight of a far longer work * DAILY MAIL *
