Search results for ""Author Leon Rooke""

"Rooke is an original...Deliberately eccentric ...deliciously inventive, always rewarding."--The Washington Post The two novellas and three short stories in this new collection by the critically-acclaimed, North Carolina-born author Leon Rooke are united by place and mood. Set largely in the post-WWII American South, peopled by Watermelon Queens and ten-year-old business men, these joyful, touching, brilliantly crafted pieces speak to a time and sensibility long forgotten. Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, editor, and critic. He has published twenty-eight books, nearly three hundred short stories, and is the recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature.

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"Grim and raw and hilarious."--The New York Times During the night of a storm, an Appalachian girl delivers a baby and disappears. Next morning, Raymond Toker finds the baby under a bush and takes to the mountain roads to find her a home. While Turner carries out his quest, the child's father, Truman, with "teeth as rotten as his soul," drives his battered car along the same paths. Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, editor, and critic. He has published twenty-eight books, nearly three hundred short stories, and is the recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature.

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Subversive, edgy, and wildly entertaining, this short story collection is a unique encounter with fiction in Leon Rooke’s characteristic style as he peels back the skin of social convention and embraces the chaos of life with characters and themes as unpredictable as an assassin who murders the words in your memory; Egi Balducchi who is either a recording angel or a mad old man with a wheelbarrow; Eli's daughter, Frannie, who may just be a gentle two-bit hooker, or the Virgin herself; and is that really God, shrugging off insults from Isaac Babel and Guy de Maupassant? Then there is Lap the Dog who escapes gunshot and poison, and heads cross-country to find the human survivors; a glimpse into the life of Joyce Carol Oates; the philosopher Heidegger in a fight with Hannah Arendt; the Indian Chief who is denied his professorship at Yale when he turns up for the ceremony with a black princess on his arm; and more... Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow is an evocative short story collection that is wild with laughter, confronting pathos, rage and humour in ways that only Rooke’s writing could approach.

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According to Russell Banks, North Carolina ex-pat Leon Rooke's work charts "what the short story form can and cannot do, for he works out there in the terra incognita mapping limits." Hitting the Charts, a nineteen story Best-Of compilation, offers stories as free from constraint as a Monk solo, and as disquieting and resonant as a southern Baptist preacher at a big-tent revival. Dancing is not forbidden.

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