The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake

Rust, Elissa Minor

ISBN 10: 0804010781 / ISBN 13: 9780804010788

Published by Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005

About this Item

ISigned by Author Signed by Author First Swallow Press Printing. Trade Paperback in Good Condition. Author inscribed and signed on Title Page. Clean and bright wrappers with art work: 'Three Pears and a Plumb' (detail) by Dan J. Annarino. Rear lower corner scuffed, back few page corners nearby ruffled, front corners witrh light wear, cover flares up a little. Internals very clean and unmarked, pages lightly toned. A dozen stories of privileged lives, taking place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, though they could be taken from any number of such places in the United States. Each story begins with an entry from the local paper's police blotter--small, odd events such as a headless parakeet in a mailbox, a nude jogger--and giving them weight and significance. The author's stories are both humorous and disturbing, going beneath the surface of a community into the murky world beneath. 193 pages. 8.25 x 5.25 inches. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 2005.

Seller Inventory # 026625

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake
• Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804010781
• ISBN 13: 9780804010788
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Thus.
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Signed: IISigned by Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction. General

About this title

Synopsis

The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States. These stories infuse stark reality with occasional hints of magical realism to explore what the American dream means to twenty-first-century suburbanites. In a city where the homecoming queen still makes the front page of the weekly newspaper, ducks caught in storm drains and stolen campaign signs make up the bulk of the paper’s crime reports. The community’s hidden complexities, however, rival those of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
Each of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper’s police blotter. Elissa Minor Rust fills in the background to these small, odd events-a headless parakeet found in a mailbox, a nude jogger, an alarmingly deathlike discarded teddy bear. Her stories, both humorous and disturbing, probe beneath the clear, hard surface of a community into the murky depths beneath.
The lake at the center of town is a constant in the lives of this town’s people, and it reappears throughout the book as a symbol of wealth and power, of love and loss. The Prisoner Pear offers a rare look inside the heart of suburban America. Reading these stories is, as one character observes, “like seeing the town from the inside out, as if the lake was its heart and the rest merely its bones and skin.”

About the Author

Elissa Minor Rust has published fiction in Baltimore Review, Orchid: A Literary Review, Bacon Street Review, and Honolulu Magazine, among other journals. She lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon.