Nice Big American Baby - Rilegato

Budnitz, Judy

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375412425 ISBN 13: 9780375412424

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2005

Riassunto

The author of If I Told You Once presents a poignant, richly varied anthology of modern fables that journey from suburban backyards and swimming pools to fallout shelters in wartorn cities, in a collection that includes "Flush," "Elephant and Boy," "Nadia," "Preparedness," "Where We Come From," and seven other tales. 25,000 first printing. First serial, The New Yorker.

Su questo libro

Recensione

“Budnitz is a riveting young short-story writer whose weird fairy tales burrow toward truths . . . Budnitz has misgivings about America’s place in the world. But she avoids even the names of countries, burning away anything that will distract from the primal questions of who we are and what we owe each other. One reviewer recently advised Budnitz to write realistic fiction . . . She already does.”
–Jeff Giles, Newsweek

“From her portrait on the book jacket, Judy Budnitz looks like a prim New England prep-school girl, but she has the imagination of a haunted Eastern European political prisoner. Her stories, set in an uncanny and often uncaring world, gesture toward political discontent but resist outrage. In ‘Where We Come From’ a desperate pregnant young woman repeatedly attempts to crash through the US border from an unnamed country . . . ‘Nadia,’ a mail-order bride from Eastern Europe tries to adapt to her new country but is never fully alive with her husband . . . ‘Saving Face’ recounts the strange sequence of events by which the image of an innocent girl replaces the ominous gaze of the prime minister in a series of looming portraits . . . Artist and model, and their relationship to the government, remain a taunting conundrum.”
–Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

“Stories set in landscapes where reality shape-shifts in unexpected ways . . . Budnitz’s surreal tales leave us questioning the nature of familial love; with each curious twist, the reader is left wanting to read more.”
–Lisa Kay Greissinger, People (4 out of 4 stars)

“Powerful . . . Graceful and singular . . . A crisp and witty stylist, Budnitz has a knack for dropping her characters into universes that are just slightly off-kilter; each sparkles with a chiseled edge . . . The thematic core of the book is the relations between parents and their children, and particularly mothers and their daughters [and their] sometimes cloying, sometimes distancing and always deeply felt bond . . . The flawed connections between mothers and their children are illuminated wisely here . . . Beyond the politics and culture of family, the politics and culture of race, poverty and autocracy are also subjects of a number of the stories. This is a collection that offers much in the way of both emotion and imagination. Budnitz manages to be both funny and serious, whimsical and substantive: With a wry rap across the knuckles she draws our attention to vital things.”
–Lydia Millet, Washington Post Book World

“At a party this past weekend, someone asked me whether I had discovered any good new writers lately. Usually that question sends me into brainlock . . . But for once, I didn’t dodge or dither in answer to that question, because I’d belatedly discovered a terrific young writer, [whose] newest [book] just might deserve that most hackneyed of publishing accolades: an original new voice. Judy Budnitz's stories have been characterized as contemporary fairy tales, riffs on the gothic, and surrealist political allegories . . . Nice Big American Baby contains twelve stories that warily circle around themes of caretaking, parenthood, and babies–genuine babies, or adults who just act like them . . . I like her writing a lot. The way [the lead] story veers off into fantasy without losing any of its emotional claims on the reader speaks to Budnitz’s distinctive power as a writer. But unlike other innovative works of fiction, Budnitz’s stories are not so caught up in their own private code that a reader reaches the end and asks, ‘What was that all about?’ In tone and technique, Budnitz’s collection reminds me a lot of John Cheever’s classic and reader-friendly fantasy about suburbia gone sour, The Swimmer . . . Budnitz is weird, but engagingly so. As a writer, she herself never swims so far out that we readers drown in her wake.”
–Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air on NPR

“The verdict: Nice big American talent. If you crossed the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez with the hip contemporary voice of Lorrie Moore, you might come up with something like the fiction of Judy Budnitz . . . Ranging from a wild surrealism (Franz Kafka would appear to be another of her masters) to a deft psychological realism, [Budnitz’s] method is to establish a governing conceit and exploit its possibilities to the furthest imaginable limit. What keeps her stories from being self-indulgently ‘experimental’ or stylistically precious is the formidable control she exerts over her material. The writing is unfailingly crisp and free of mannerisms, and she exhibits a practiced surefootedness that is rare in so young a writer . . . Wonderfully funny and sharply observed . . . Impressive . . . Moving . . . Exuberant . . . Few contemporary writers of any age can offer the range and versatility so triumphantly on display in Nice Big American Baby. In this her third book, Judy Budnitz has shown herself to be one of America’s most engaging and innovative fictional voices.”
–Greg Johnson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Extraordinary . . . daring, haunting and utterly original. [Budnitz] has the uncanny ability to match macabre scenarios with offbeat, dark humor and magic realism with captivating storytelling. [Her] deft storytelling makes her stories strangely believable as well as absorbing. In ‘Where We Come From,’ [a pregnant woman undergoes] a series of terrifying border crossings so her child will be ‘a nice, big, American baby,’ a phrase in which every word is loaded with unsettling meaning . . . Eerie . . . Memorable . . . Enchanting . . . The buzz on Budnitz is that she is one of a kind, a big talent who juggles the fantastic, surreal, political and futuristic without breaking a sweat. The impressive Nice Big American Baby . . . leaves us breathless, astonished and more than a little bit awed.”
–Susan Miron, Miami Herald

“Masterly . . . Sparkling . . . [‘Miracle’ was] one of [The New Yorker’s] most striking stories in years . . . Budnitz takes human anxieties and overlays them with a surreal twist and a sprinkling of the absurd. Reading Budnitz’s stories is like experiencing the exhilaration of flight along with the queasiness of vertigo . . . Despite their range of subject matter and genres, the stories share a unique tone that combines offbeat humor, unnerving details and emotional resonance . . . Distinctive, imaginative.”
–Sarah Coleman, San Francisco Chronicle

“Stories set in landscapes where reality shape-shifts in unexpected ways . . . Budnitz’s surreal tales leave us questioning the nature of familial love; with each curious twist, the reader is left wanting to read more.”
–Lisa Kay Greissinger, People (4 out of 4 stars)

“It’s Judy Budnitz’s world, and we are all just visitors. Or so it seems when reading the fiction of this provocative writer, whose work may remind one a bit of Aimee Bender here, a touch of George Saunders there, but is, in the end, entirely original. Budnitz’s new story collection serves up [a] potent stew of surrealism, comedy and horror . . . brimming with graphic images that are plainly intended to disturb . . . For dauntless readers, the rewards are considerable . . . Intriguing.”
–Donna Rifkind, Baltimore Sun

“Sharp and even ingenious . . . In ‘Flush,’ the absurd recalls Barthelmean tenderness. A mother refuses to have a mammogram; a daughter insists on taking her. The mother slips away just before her name is called; embarrassed, the daughter gets it instead . . . Scream a little softer, the saying goes. ‘Flush’ screams very quietly indeed. It makes itself heard with clarity and grace.”
–Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Excellent . . . Young and precociously talented, Budnitz writes stories that are wildly imaginative [and] thought-provoking . . . Like Kafka in ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Budnitz often establishes a far-fetched premise and treats it with deadpan literalism. What if a family kept traveling salesmen imprisoned in a pen, as if they were farm animals? What if a deranged Civil War surgeon planted amputated limbs in a field? Budnitz, at heart, is a political writer, and a number of her stories are powered by anger at the disparity of wealth between the first and third worlds, and the obliviousness of the privileged to the suffering of the oppressed. The collision of Budnitz’s political agenda with her subversive narrative imagination gives these stories their distinctive feel. At her best, Budnitz invents outrageous plots that somehow carry the weight of truth . . . [She] can write. . .realist fiction, too, with a sure-handed grasp of the form . . . ‘Immersion,’ a troubling narrative about black kids who take over a public pool during the dark days of the polio epidemic reveals [the] terrible self-defeating tribal realities of race ferociously and affectingly . . . ‘Flush’ is a lovely, haunting meditation on the odd, selfish and selfless ways people act when forced to face up to their own mortality and those of their family members . . . [Budnitz] is a gifted writer.”
–Tom Perrotta, New York Times Book Review

“Budnitz has a tone all her own. Call it everyday surreal . . . In ‘Saving Face,’ an imprisoned woman tells her captors a story of love, obsession, art, and propaganda that explains why she really isn’t the reviled prime minister of a mysterious dictatorship. ‘Visitors’ channels Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor. Budnitz’s collection is jarring, humane, funny, and so lively it practically buzzes. &#...

L'autore

Judy Budnitz’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Story, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Fence, and McSweeney’s, and she is the recipient of an O. Henry Award. Flying Leap was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. Budnitz is also the author of the novel If I Told You Once, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in the United States and was short-listed for the Orange Prize in Britain. She lives in San Francisco.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0375412425
• ISBN 13: 9780375412424
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 285