HIGHWAY TRADE: Short Stories and a Novella - Softcover

DOMINI, JOHN

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888996072 ISBN 13: 9781888996074

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 1998

Synopsis

“John Domini is one of those rare writers who doesn’t bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead. In lesser hands, Domini’s people would have been drowned in bathos. But Domini honors them with a generous but unsentimental imagination, giving us lives worth knowing about, layered portrayals of the obdurate world and our own terrifying self-betrayals. His profound, unflinching attention reminds us how closely together fiction, at its best, can unite justice with mercy.”

―Jay Cantor

“John Domini’s densely textured stories teem with compelling inner and outer life. He is a master at capturing the complex workings of minds under stress and the hard-edged negotiations we make with fate when our backs are against a wall. He knows how women and men can behave with one another. The stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader’s heart.”

―Floyd Skloot

“Fiery, crackling prose. Domini’s writing wields a double-bladed humor that is both fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark. Highway Trade is a sharp and compassionate work; unforgettable.”

―Diana Abu-Jaber

About this title

From the Author

Linked stories, knockabout realism, about the changing West.
"Highway Trade" presents a portrait-in-action of the Willamette Valley in Oregon -- a place where America's West has changed, within a generation, from wilderness to suburb. The drama concentrates on new outsiders created by this new west: on recent arrivals from "back East" (for instance a black baseball player on a hot streak), or from outside the country (for instance a rookie newspaper reporter from Mexico). Many of the stories feature women protagonists, and it does seem to me that the changing postion of women, over the last generation, embodies the more general change across the American West. Also, as I composed these stories, it was important to me not to be minimalist. Rather, I strove for vivifying detail: Oregon has a dozen degrees of rain, at least, creating an awesome array of greens, yellows, and browns. And I imagined knockabout lives: messy love affairs, stunted fistfights, suicide, more. Overall, I wanted a western portrait th! at engaged the whole reader, prompting suspenseful caring, triggering rueful recognitions, and suggesting in the end a bent yet brave new version of the American dream.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1888996072
• ISBN 13: 9781888996074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192