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| This Day in History
ISBN: 9781587296499
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Boys -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction;
Varallo retreads the familiar cul-de-sacs of bored, awkward suburban adolescence in these 12 solemn tales that comprise his listless debut collection. As the eighth-grade narrator of "The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg" yearns for his neighbor Carolyn and goofs off with his friend Ben, whose college-age older brother Mark commits suicide, he mulls over The Great Gatsby. The latchkey sixth-grade narrator of "The Pines" (his artist father took up with a college student and ditched his mother) is all too vulnerable to an older bully who drags him into minor vandalism. In "A Dictionary of Saints," the 14-year-old protagonist defies peer pressure and attends the birthday party of unpopular Brady Carson, who accepts his friendship with prickly pride instead of gratitude. "Sunday Wash" establishes a sympathetic kinship between a young boy, Jody, and his mother's well-meaning, but ill-equipped, live-in boyfriend, Ron, when the boy-still grieving his dead father-breaks down in a car wash. Varallo sympathetically paints children unbalanced by death or divorce, but his understated prose aims for insight without often reaching it. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Anthony Varallo grew up in Yorklyn, Delaware. His stories have appeared in Epoch, Crazyhorse, Story Quarterly, the Black Warrior Review, and other publications. He is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Journal Short Story Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He lives with his wife, the writer Malinda McCollum, and their son in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston. |
