A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories - Hardcover

Christine Schutt (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810151537 ISBN 13: 9780810151536

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The title of Christine Schutt's second collection strikes the theme of swiftly passing time that runs through each of the stories. In ""The Life of the Palm and the Breast"" a woman watches her half-grown children running through the house and wonders: Whose boys are these? Whose life is this? The title story tells of a grandfather who has lived long enough to see his daughter's struggles echoed in his granddaughter and how her unhappiness leads him to unexpectedly feel the weight of his years. In ""Darkest of All"" a mother's relationship with her sons is wreaked by a repeated cycle of drugs and abusive relationships, the years pass and the pain-and its chosen remedy-remains the same. The narrator in ""Winterreise"" evokes Thoreau and strives to be heroic in the face of her longtime friend's imminent death, a harsh reminder of the time that is allotted to each of us. Schutt's indomitable, original talent is once again on full display in each of these deeply informed, intensely realized stories. Many of the narratives take place in a space as small as a house, where the doors are many and what is hidden behind these thin domestic barriers tends towards violence, abusive sex, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments that also reveal how the characters are often hopeful, even optimistic. With a style that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, she exposes the terrible intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives.

About this title

Review:

""Florida is an amazing achievement." --John Ashbery
"Unparalleled etchings of loss and foreboding." --Kirkus Reviews
"No one has been writing more sublimely about heartwreck than Christine
Schutt. Her new collection is terrifyingly precise, profound, and perfect."
-Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive
"This new book of stories confirms Christine Schutt's brilliant reputation as an important American writer. Like Emily Dickinson, and with the same secretive precision, Schutt unfolds a deeply intimate vision, revealing to us, as only short stories can, bare-boned glimpses into the most private of realms. Each story cuts sharply into an existence, holds it before us, and then departs. We are left with a sense of having witnessed something deeply private and exact--the truth of family, of the tormented anguish of familial love. These are daring, radical stories. Together they form a quietly radical document, as sharp, stunning and tragic as anything I've read in years." --David Means, author of The Secret Goldfish

From the Back Cover:

"This new book of stories confirms Christine Schutt s brilliant reputation as an important American writer. Like Emily Dickinson, and with the same secretive precision, Schutt unfolds a deeply intimate vision, revealing to us, as only short stories can, bare-boned glimpses into the most private of realms." David Means, author of The Secret Goldfish

Christine Schutt's distinct gifts are again on display in her much anticipated second collection of stories. With prose that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, Schutt gives voice to what most keep hidden. Her characters rumpled, damned, redeemed, and persevering struggle to find cover in an unsettled world of skewed desire. Startling and smartly wrought, A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER is an impressive work by a rare talent.
"With A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer, Schutt adds another notch to her oeuvre, offering a set of intense, dark, and daring stories that have all the qualities of a summer thriller . . . Her stories feel forbidden in the best way." Rain Taxi Review of Books

"[Schutt s] style runs closer to poetry than prose . . . The effect is deeply moving." Newsday

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collection Nightwork and the novel Florida, a National Book Award Finalist. Her work, which has garnered an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, is published widely in literary journals. She lives and teaches in New York.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0810151537
• ISBN 13: 9780810151536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96