The Way That Water Enters Stone: Stories - Softcover

Dufresne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393331024 ISBN 13: 9780393331028

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

Written with a truly original fiction voice, John Dufresne's powerful debut collection of stories is filled with quirky characters in hours of crisis and flashes of humor in moments of dark despair.

A Louisiana farmer sees the images of Christ appear on the freezer door and questions the meaning of faith. In a Maine resort town, Miss Langevin, a spinster who could write a book on disappointment, now gets a chance to help another woman escape it. And in the title story, a science teacher's modest dreams and painful memories erode his existence like water entering stone.

As an observer of secrets in these and other offbeat lives, John Dufresne crisscrosses the eastern United States like a contemporary Dos Passos, hearing familiar voices, letting them meander through his unique imagination, then spinning them out in stories rich with irony, braced by melancholy, and based on truth.

About this title

About the Author

John Dufresne is the author of elevenprevious books, including three fiction writing guides. A professor in the MFA program at Florida International University, he lives in Dania Beach.

From Publishers Weekly

Dufresne stares unblinkingly into the void in ordinary people's lives. The characters in this powerful debut short story collection desperately seek a salvation that they suspect will never come and yet, in just muddling through, his drifters, fast-food clerks, farmers, innkeepers, movie addicts, loners and losers achieve a certain dignity. Many search for a reference point to provide meaning, whether in an illegally grown tomato-garden, a smudge on a refrigerator door that seemingly erupts into "the very face of Jesus," or in a fired science teacher's obsessive ruminations on a wife who keeps walking out on him. In "Hard Time the First Time," a compulsive list-maker, living with a mentally handicapped roommate, tries to convince his estranged wife to cohabit with them as an extended family. In "Must I Be Carried to the Sky on Flowered Beds of Ease?" a terminally ill man, who may have AIDS, goes home to his alienated father's place to die. Winner of a PEN fiction award, Dufresne carves a fictional territory extending from the bleak Massachusetts of Andre Dubus to the godforsaken Deep South of Flannery O'Connor. His distinctive voice makes this realm his own.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393331024
• ISBN 13: 9780393331028
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252