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“The Adopted Son” by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). A wealthy couple, apparently unable to have children of their own, offers to adopt the youngest child, a boy, of a rural family with a large brood in exchange for a monthly stipend. The parents refuse to “sell” their son, whereupon the couple makes the same offer to the family’s neighbors, who also have many children. The second offer is accepted, and the boy is whisked immediately away by the happy couple. Years pass, and the grown son returns to reunite with his birth parents, with perhaps unexpected consequences.
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Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans. L(ucy) M(aud) Montgomery. 1988. McClelland & Stewart (Toronto). By the author of Anne of Green Gables. Contents include: Charlotte’s Quest; Marcella’s Reward; An Invitation Given on Impulse ; Freda’s Adopted Grave; Ted’s Afternoon Off; Girl Who Drove the Cows; Why Not Ask Miss Price?; Jane Lavinia; Running Away of Chester; Millicent’s Double; Penelope’s Party Waist; Little Black Doll; Fraser Scholarship; Her Own People; Miss Sally’s Company; The Story of an Invitation; The Softening of Miss Cynthia; Margaret’s Patient; Charlotte’s Ladies.
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“Aunt Mary’s Adoption” by Ellen J Craig. From Hillsborough’s Haunted House And Aunt Mary’s Adoption: Short Stories. 1974. 35p. Carlton Press.
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“The Baby Tramp” by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). 1891. Fist appeared in The Wave, Aug. 29, 1891. First anthologized in Can Such Things Be. Ambrose Bierce. 1893. 320p. Cassell Publishing Co.; and subsequently in Scary!: Stories That Will Make You Scream!, Peter Haining, ed. 1998. 223p. Souvenir Press Ltd.; and The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Ernest Jerome Hopkins, ed. 1971. (Volume 1: The World of Horror). Ballentine; among others. A story about the ghost of Hetty Parlow and how the life of her son, Joseph (Jo), came to a strange and ironic end subsequent to his being orphaned at the tender age of one. About the Author: Ambrose Bierce never owned a horse, a carriage, or a car; he was a renter who never owned his own home. He was a man on the move, a man who traveled light: and in the end he rode, with all of his possessions, on a rented horse into the Mexican desert to join Pancho Villa—never to return. Can Such Things Be? Once William Randolph Hearst—Bierce’s employer, who was bragging about his own endless collections of statuary, art, books, tapestries, and, of course real estate like Hearst Castle—once William Randolph Hearst asked Bierce what he collected. Bierce responded, smugly: “I collect words. And ideas. Like you, I also store them. But in the reservoir of my mind. I can take them out and display them at a moment’s notice. Eminently portable, Mr. Hearst. And I don’t find it necessary to show them all at the same time.” Such things can be. twenty-four tales of the weird by Ambrose Bierce, renowned master of the macabre.
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“The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves” by David Morrell. First published in Final Shadows, edited by Charles L. Grant. 1991. Doubleday; also published in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. 1992. St Martin’s Press; and, most recently, in Black Evening. David Morrell. 1998. 439p. Warner Books. This story, whose title is taken from a line in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, won the 1991 Best Novella Award from the Horror Writers of America. It tells the story of a man who, after his parents are both killed in a horrific automobile crash caused by a drunk driver, discovers surrender papers for two children, executed one week before his own birth, by a woman whose name he does not recognize, in a town in California, among the papers of his dead father who, like himself, was a lawyer. Not being able to imagine why his father would keep such a document among his personal papers in a safe deposit box, he asks the obvious question: Am I adopted? Against the advice of his family, he seeks the answer to this troubling question, and finds something even more horrible than he could ever have imagined. About the Author: David Morrell was born in Canada. He is a former Professor of American Literature at the University of Iowa. He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mr. Morrell is a multiple bestselling author, with over fifteen million copies of his books in print, translated into 22 languages. His novels include First Blood (basis for the Sylvester Stallone action movie Rambo), Testament and Blood Oath, and, more recently, Extreme Denial and Double Image. In the Foreword to his collection of short stories, Black Evening, David Morrell wrote that his fiction often reveals his inmost fears: ... I grew up with a morbid fear of war, that economic necessity [which] forced my mother to put me in an orphanage for a time, [and] I could never be sure whether the woman who reclaimed me was the same person who had given me up ....
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Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?. Elyse Gasco. 1999. 256p. Picador USA. Elyse Gasco’s debut collection is a novel take on an oft-explored subject: mother-daughter relationships. These eight interrelated stories all examine adoption from several perspectives. In “A Well-Imagined Life,” the narrator is a young woman trying to imagine the woman who gave her up; in “You Have the Body,” she is an adopted woman about to give birth to her own child; and in the title story, the character is about to give up her baby for adoption. Each of these tales offers a unique perspective on the parent-child bond; unfortunately, almost all of them are written in the oppressively self-conscious second-person—a literary tic that can be more distracting than effective. Fantasizing late at night about alternatives to her impending motherhood, for example, the unnamed narrator of “You Have the Body” imagines running away: “Soon, you will be skinny again. You will only wear dresses. You will never be afraid of strangers. You will drink men under the table and sleep with college freshmen. They will read to you excitedly from their textbooks, their cheeks still raw from shaving too fast. You will take a woman lover and live in North Africa with a turban wrapped around your head.” No doubt Gasco’s intention is to catapult us willy-nilly into the character’s innermost thoughts; unfortunately, page upon page of this relentless, in-your-face you you you more often than not drives the reader in the opposite direction. (Sleep with college freshmen, you protest. Hell, no!) Applied judiciously, this literary gimmick might have worked; using it in six out of the eight stories, however, is definite overkill. Indeed, the strongest story in the collection, “Mother: Not a True Story,” is written in the third person. Here Gasco crafts a deft, darkly humorous portrait of an adoptive mother who creates a fictional birth mother for her dissatisfied teenaged daughter. Perhaps the best way to read Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? is intermittently, so as to enjoy Elyse Gasco’s passion and point of view without getting run over by her style. — Alix Wilber
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“Carrying” by Nalini Jones. From What You Call Winter. 2007. 272p. Knopf. From Kirkus Reviews: A debut collection of intertwined short stories set in India and America. The Almeida family, their cousins and friends live in Santa Clara, a Roman Catholic residential enclave in India. Those who remain witness over time the demolition of its graceful gardens and airy homes to make way for apartment complexes and commerce. Those who leave for America either live a life apart, at home in neither place, or, worse, live with guilt for finding happiness so far from their family. As the collection opens, Marian Almeida is a ten-year-old on the cusp of puberty in the haunting “In the Garden.” Later, in “Half the Story,” she reappears, married, living with her Irish husband and children in Cincinnati, uncertain of how to protect her older daughter from the sexuality that arrives in the form of a neighbor, a brash American divorcee. Jude Almeida, Marian’s younger brother, unwittingly instigates a wicked display of psychological violence that occurs at a New Year’s party in “The Crow and the Monkey.” In the final story, “This Is Your Home Also,” Jude is an adult, living with his elderly, increasingly ineffectual parents. In other stories, members of the extended family take center stage: Colleen, a closeted lesbian, returns from America for her mother Grace’s cataract operation in “The Bold, the Beautiful”; Grace’s son Michael and his wife visit from America with their adopted child in “Carrying”; Roddy D’Souza, a long-time friend and gymkhana card partner of Francis Almeida, begins seeing his father, who died 65 years before, riding a bike around town in the title story. Jones brings the narrative skill of a seasoned writer to this work. She is best at evoking the fearful lonesomeness of alienation, whether it is in the mind of a child observing what he cannot understand, or in the heart of a mother who cannot stop change. An impressive debut. Visit the Author’s website.
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“Casa de los Babys” by John Sayles. From Dillinger in Hollywood: New & Selected Short Stories. 2004. 352p. Nation Books. From Kirkus Reviews: Ten stories from the legendary Hollywood director: some good, some passable, all worthwhile. It’s fair to say that Sayles has been known for his independent stance and writing talent as much as anything: in the film world, what has garnered him attention are his words and settings. He’s also a novelist (Los Gusanos, 1991), and now—after 25 years—he brings us a second collection of tales (after The Anarchists’ Convention, 1979). “The Halfway Diner” is a hallmark selection, a tough and poignant portrait of a band of women making the long bus trip across a desert to visit their men in jail. Not much happens—these, for the most part, are stories long on small knots of characters talking, short on action—but it’s an exacting piece of work. The title piece, from 1980, collects the reactions of a number of lower-rung Hollywood employees in a rest home when one of their number, a guy who’d supposedly been a driver on the Fox lot, declares that he used to be John Dillinger. It’s a short little surprise, like a postcard from old Hollywood and quite funny for the often didactic Sayles. The meat of the volume is likely “Casa de los Babys,” a lengthy [previously unpublished] story from 2000 that was the basis for a film three years later. The setting is phenomenal, a group of American women in a rundown Mexico hotel waiting for the glacially slow bureaucracy to provide them with the children they came down to adopt. A well-nuanced selection of examples of American ignorance, arrogance,and innocence, the women alternate between support and backbiting, each not-so-secretly hoping her baby comes first. As in his films, Sayles proves better over the short stretch, with his punchy dialogue and socially astute ear, whileoccasionally lacking the story drive to carry him through longer passages. Not much in the way of knockouts here, but plenty of solid shots.
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Confessions of a Bad Girl. Stories by Bette Pesetsky. 1989. 211p. Atheneum. Prize-winning author’s second collection of short stories, most about two families loosely connected by one character—Cissie—the “bad girl” of the title.
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“A Couple of Kooks” by Cynthia Rylant. From A Couple of Kooks and Other Stories About Love. 1990. 104p. Orchard Books. From School Library Journal: Eight finely crafted stories explore various aspects of love from a variety of perspectives. From the two 16-year-olds, wise beyond their years, who are preparing for separation from their as yet unborn child in the title story, to the optimistic musings of an old man at his grandaughter’s wedding, readers are treated to unique yet universal observations of people in love. The stories are filled with both humor and heartbreak, but the sensibility of Rylant’s voice and her distinctly drawn characters evoke genuine sentiment while avoiding sentimentality. Original in plot and rich in imagery, the stories read smoothly, offering a broad range of experience and viewpoint. Although half of the stories feature adolescent characters, the themes may be of more interest to adults than to young readers. However, those who delve into the book will be well rewarded. —Starr LaTronica, North Berkeley Library, CA; Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Dancing on the Moon: Short Stories About AIDS. Jameson Currier. 1993. 208p. Viking. In the title story from Dancing on the Moon a young man, thinking of all his friends who have died from AIDS and those who are ill, says: “No one out there has a clue as to what our lives are like. All this is as strange to them as dancing on the moon.” The speaker marveling at the gulf that separates those affected by AIDS from a world that thinks itself immune is just one of the memorable characters in this unprecedented book of twelve virtuoso stories about the impact of AIDS, particularly as it has reverberated through the lives of gay men. With profound literary courage, Jameson Currier documents what those lives are like. With sure-handed narrative skill, Chekhovian compassion, and remarkable grace, Currier writes not only about those who are living with AIDS and those who have died from it but also about the friends, families, and lovers who nurse and care for the sick and remember them afterward. His characters range from rebellious Southern teenagers to an elderly Jewish woman whose grandson has died, to an infant with AIDS adopted by an AIDS widower and his new lover. “What They Carried” concerns the things friends bring and give to another friend over the course of his struggle with the disease. “Reunions” finds two men sharing a bizarre cab ride in the last days of their illnesses. In “The Absolute Worst” a woman reunites two former lovers from her college years. A woman submerges herself in the new life of her dead brother’s lover in order to come to terms with her own losses in “Weekends.” In “Ghosts” a man seeks out a dying acquaintance in an unconscious attempt to justify his own lover’s suicide. In all the stories men and women search for order and reason during a health crisis that knows no rationale.
As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmonde drove over to L’Abri to see Desiree and the baby.
It made her laugh to think of Desiree with a baby. Why, it seems but yesterday that Desiree was little more than a baby herself; when Monsieur in riding through the gateway of Valmonde had found her lying asleep in the shadow of the big stone pillar.
The little one awoke in his arms and began to cry for “Dada.” That was as much as she could do or say. Some people thought she might have strayed there of her own accord, for she was of the toddling age. The prevailing belief was that she had been purposely left by a party of Texans, whose canvas-covered wagon, late in the day, had crossed the ferry that Coton Mais kept, just below the plantation. In time Madame Valmonde abandoned every speculation but the one that Desiree had been sent to her by a beneficent Providence to be the child of her affection, seeing that she was without child of the flesh. For the girl grew to be beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere—the idol of Valmonde. ... Read It On-Line!
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“The Fenton Child” by Mavis Gallant. From Across the Bridge. 1993. 198p. Random House. Eleven more spare, elegant stories from French-Canadian author Gallant (In Transit, 1989, etc.), ten of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Interconnected vignettes of the family Carette form the first four stories. In “1933,” a newly widowed but stalwart Mme. Carette is forced to move with her young daughters Berthe and Marie to a smaller apartment in a seedy street in Montreal. Sixteen years later, in “The Chosen Husband,” a still resolute Mme. Carette arranges a marriage for her feeble-witted younger child Marie. By the ’60s, in “From Cloud to Cloud,” Marie’s husband has died and Marie must move in with older sister Berthe; meanwhile, Marie’s 18-year-old son Raymond steals the family Volkswagen and flees to the US and Vietnam. “Florida” recounts his subsequent spotty career in the motel trade. Other stories are divided between Montreal and Paris, where Gallant has lived since the 1950s. In “Dede,” an upper-class Parisian schoolboy is braced by a visit from his black-sheep uncle. In the lengthy title story, a feisty French-Italian girl almost succeeds in overturning her mother’s plan that she marry Arnaud Pons, son of Parisian family friends—until she discovers that marrying Arnaud is exactly what will make her happy. In “Forain” and the lovely “A State of Affairs,” Gallant touchingly follows the now circumscribed lives of a handful of elderly Central European refugees in Paris. And in the final, brilliant “The Fenton Child,” she returns to Montreal, where a proper Irish Catholic girl—with a charming ward-heeler for a father—aids in what she comes to realize is an illegal adoption arranged for an “English” family in the district. In each of these pieces and others, the details are all: shades of meaning turn on the condition of the furnishings and the color of the light. Another fine collection from Gallant. — From Kirkus Reviews; ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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“Fantasy Fest” by John Hersey. From Key West Tales. 1993. Knopf. “Fantasy Fest” is a story about a woman who has been contacted by the son she had put up for adoption when he was an infant. In his letter to her he suggests that they each dress up as “their own particular fantasy” about themselves and join in Key West’s Halloween parade. He is confident that using this ploy they will both be naturally drawn to one another. By the Same Author: The Child Buyer.
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Ghost at Heart’s Edge, A: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Susan Ito & Tina Cervin, editors, & Jacquelyn Mitchard. 1999. 400p. North Atlantic Books. While there are many non-fiction books available on adoption, A Ghost at Heart’s Edge is the only book which contains adoption literature, in the form of short stories and poetry. Written by both well-known and novice authors, including Alison Lurie, Isabel Allende, Sandra McPherson, Louise Erdrich, Chitra Divakaruni, and Lynna Williams, this collection conveys the wide range of emotions involved for all of those touched by adoption, including 30 million people in the United States today.
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“Girls Like Us” by Catherine Browder. From Secret Lives. 2003. 200p. Southern Methodist University Press. This story details the events surrounding the extra-marital pregnancy of a “practical” Navy wife and subsequent surrender of the resultant baby girl for adption, including the circumstances of the underlying affiar (an absentee husband), a “difficult” birth, an “ideal” adoption, and the explanation of all of this to the couple’s four sons. Other stories in the collection include: “Silver Maple,” in which a sheriff’s wife is jailed for threatening a city work crew preparing to cut down her beloved maple; “Pizza Man,” the story of a Ukrainian emigre who learns the hard way about the perils of his new delivery job; “Fusuda the Archer,” which concerns a tall, blonde, American woman, married to a Japanese businessman, who has apprenticed herself to a traditional archer; “Amnesty,” in which a Mexican-American social worker is unable to maintain a professional distance from two young Mexican brothers seeking asylum; and “The Juice-Seller’s Bird,” in which an American nun’s ambivalent feelings toward a pair of orphans—one ugly, reticent, and unwaveringly devoted to her charmed, enchanting baby sister—are revealed against the disconcerting backdrop of Mexico City’s devastating earthquake.
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Gumbo for the Soul: “Here’s Our Child—Where’s the Village?”. Beverly Black Johnson, ed. 2008. 128p. iUniverse, Inc. An anthology of inspirational essays and poetry by adoptees, adoptive parents, professionals, and some of America’s most prolific writiers to heighten awarenessof adoption worldwide. About the Editor: Beverly Black Johnson hails from the San Francisco. She is the publisher of the award-winning book, Gumbo For The Soul: The Recipe for Literacy in the Black Community, which garnered an endorsement from talk show host, Tavis Smiley. Since its inception in 2003, Gumbo has grown into an ongoing project to produce a series. Beverly’s two oldest children escaped adoption during some rough periods in her life when her mother stepped in acting as the “Village.” Her story will be told in a full biographical account of her life’s trials and tribulations. More info is available at www.gumboforthesoul.com.
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“The Hero of Lonliness” by Christie Hodgen. From New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best 2001. Shannon Ravenel, Editor. Preface by Lee Smith. 2001. 386p. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Sixteenth volume in one of the generally most satisfying annual anthologies of contemporary fiction. In a conversational preface about her sushi bar in North Carolina, a paradigm for the evolving region, novelist Lee Smith provides this year’s answer to the anthology’s knotty implied question, “What is the South, anyway?” “We Southerners love a story,” she writes. “This is the main thing that has not changed ... [and] that will never change.” The contributors this time around would probably agree: most are younger writers just putting a novel or two behind them, and each has a significant, connection to the region. Many of the stories, admittedly, are sluggish and perform a single narrative trick, like “Saturday Morning Car Wash Club,” about how one boy fools a bunch of bullies to get his car washed (“no big whoop,” James Ellis Thomas aptly observes in the author’s note). But there are a handful that shine. Christie Hodgen’s piercingly sad “The Hero of Loneliness” tells of an adopted boy’s struggle with his inner demons, which prompts a lifetime of wandering. George Singleton offers “Public Relations,” a mirthful portrait of a p.r. shark who destroys companies for a living and attempts to keep his private life whole. Edith Pearlman’s “Skin Deep” adores two unrelated characters who pursue their single, celibate lives with a sense of satisfying completeness. Nicola Mason’s “The Whimsied World” consists of five dreamlike “miniatures,” loopy but engaging fables about everyday objects. Immediately recognizable writers include Madison Smartt Bell, whose unaffected (if not artless) narratives are buoyed only by his fluent, gentle style; and John Barth, who tells us that the default of hiscomputer’s date-function inspired this story about time, aging, and memory. No anthology satisfies all readers, but Ravenel’s editorial eye is as sharp as ever, appealing to the center of the heart rather than the middle of the brow. — From Kirkus Reviews
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High on a Windy Hill. Margery Evans Eldridge. 2001. 87p. Eakin Press. This is a collection of stories told by Maggie, a young girl who spent most of her youth at an orphanage in Sherman, a town in far North Texas. She returns to the Home to meet several of the kids she grew up with for a reunion. They also want to discuss what is to become of the dilapidated and crumbling red brick buildings that used to be their home. Before they arrive, she remembers the time when she, her sister, and her brother first arrived at this once beautiful place, high on a windy hill. Based on true events, High on a Windy Hill was written by a former resident of the orphanage who now lives in Garland, TX.
“I’m in the Middle” by Robert McLaughlin. 1947. First appeared in The NewYorker, June 14, 1947. A middle-aged couple asks the assistance of their friend, Dr. Hardesty—they want to adopt a baby and ask him to look at one which is advertised for adoption in the newspaper. The doctor is revolted to discover that the child, which is not to be born for two months, is being offered for adoption on receipt of $10,000 so that the father can purchase a bar and grill with the money.
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“Liar” by Claire Castillon. From My Mother Never Dies. Translated by Alison Anderson. 2009. 176p. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. From Kirkus Reviews: The English-language debut of a bestselling French author. There is something inherently awful—or at least awfully delicate—in the relationship between mothers and daughters. Such, in any case, is the lesson embedded in this slim, incisive collection of very short stories. In some of these narratives, the parent-child bond is simply absent—the two principle characters are shackled together by the accident of birth, rather than by love. Many of these stories, though, describe a union marred by an excess of intimacy. Mothers destroy their daughters by overidentifying with them, by violating the boundaries that distinguish nurturance and protection from smothering and abuse. In “My Best Friend,” a woman embraces her own second adolescence when her daughter becomes a teenager, and, in “My Dad’s Not a Monster, Mom,” a woman with too much knowledge of her father’s betrayals sacrifices herself to her mother’s frailty. Some of these stories are rather funny. “Liar” offers a skeptical, child’s-eye view of adults in general and mothers in particular. In “I Said One,” a woman who grudgingly agrees to provide her husband with a single child finds a shockingly straightforward solution to the problem of twins. Castillon dares the reader to laugh—or, possibly, to not laugh—at the narrator’s utter lack of maternal instinct. Some of the stories are less successful than others: The tale of a woman who drives her tomboy daughter to breast implants and worse—much worse—is heavy-handed, as is the title story. Still, the best entries are well-honed and distinguished by vivid, unflinching candor. And there’s even the occasional a ray of hope: “Shame” is a lovely portrait of a teenaged girl learning toappreciate her mortifying—which is to say loving, attentive and appropriately protective—mother. Castillon’s stories depict the disasters wrought by the intensity of the mother-daughter bond, while still suggesting the possibility of a love that’s sublime in its fragility and imperfection. Read the story online at Google Books.
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“The Millionarie” by Thomas McGuane. From To Skin a Cat: Stories. 1986. 212p. Dutton. This collection of 12 stories seems to prove once more that McGuane is a writer who lacks consistency. When he is good, he is very good; at other times he can be underpowering. Some of these tales are highly interesting, imbued with power and the ability to startle; in others, McGuane seems to be coasting, failing to deliver the bite that makes the difference between a good and a great story. The title narrative, the last in the collection, has that bite. The tale of a jaded young man who aspires to become a pimp, it teeters on the edge of the bizarre until it finally crosses over. Another story, “The Millionaire,” exhibits a delicious tension as the parents of a pregnant teenager await the arrival of the child whose adoption has already been arranged as a sort of birth of convenience. Taken as a whole, the collection is entertaining, sometimes memorable.
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“The Mission of Jane” by Edith Wharton (1862-1937). First published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 1902. First Anthologized in The Descent of Man, and Other Stories. Edith Wharton. 1904. 312p. Scribner’s. A story concerning the effect of Jane, the daughter the Lethburys adopt and raise, on the life and marriage of her adotive parents.
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News of the World, The. Ron Carlson. 1987. 187p. WW Norton & Co. In this funny, touching collection of stories, the characters are regular, everyday types who love their families and lead honest lives. And it is just this ordinariness that makes them special. In “The H Street Sledding Record,” a man throws horse manure on his roof every Christmas Eve to keep the myth of Santa alive. “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” is the claim of another man whose wife has disappeared without a trace, the only clue is that the kitchen smells funny: hairy. A third man finds that “The Uses of Videotape” are many: he uses a VCR to explain some mysterious goings-on in his bedroom while he and his wife are sleeping. While these wonderful stories seem to concern the people we see on the street or in the supermarket, they are quietly proving that nothing is normal, but all is well.
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Nice Big American Baby. Judy Budnitz. 2005. 320p. Alfred A Knopf, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews: Twelve tales edging toward the surreal yet grounded in nitty-gritty details of domesticity. “Where We Come From” sets the tone, somewhere between fairy tale and ghost story. In an unnamed country, an unloved daughter grows into her name, Precious, after her more beloved brothers are lost to war and famine. Then a visiting soldier impregnates Precious. Desperate to have her child born in the US, she keeps the child in her womb for four years. When she finally gives birth, American officials immediately take the child away and deport Precious. She returns, perhaps, to watch her son through the bedroom window of the adopted home where he grows up loved but alien. Another baby crisis occurs in “Miracle” when a white couple gives birth to a baby with ebony black skin. Despite the child’s oddness-abnormally heavy, he tends to disappear and reappear at will-the mother’s love is overarching. When his skin turns pink, she panics that he is no longer her child (every mother’s fear as her child changes, Budnitz implies). This tenuous relationship between looks and identity crops up in the volume’s third major story, “saving Face,” the complex “testimony” of a woman who may be the former dictator of another unnamed country or may simply be a woman whose face represented the dictator on posters painted by the woman’s lover. The final story, “Motherland,” brings the volume full circle. An island’s men leave for war and never return. Soldiers (American) briefly visit and impregnate the women left behind. The resulting daughters and sons are raised apart to avoid incest, but when a lone man shows up, the daughters experiment with him and find themselves pregnant as a group once again. So the cyclecontinues. O. Henry-winner and novelist (I Told You So, 1999) Budnitz shows major talent in her creation of a distinctive fictional world, ambiguous and complex.
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“Oh Yes, I Remember” by Rebecca Buckley. From Love Has a Price Tag. 2006. 316p. Lulu.com. It all begins on a frightful night in “Shoe’s on the Other Foot,” then prepare to blush and get warm all over when you read the sensual scenes in “Batman’s Riddler in Kansas City.” You may relate to “Answer the Phone,” a breaking off with the old and starting anew, then we travel to Oklahoma in “Please Come Back” and feel the fear of a young woman in hiding, after which you’ll experience that time we all dread when we’re too old in “Take Me, Lord, Take Me Now.” Next it’s a teen-age girl in awe of a movie star in “Cary Grant & Pink Corduroy,” and you better have a handkerchief handy when you read “Oh Yes, I Remember”—all about lost love and prejudices. You’ll cheer for Amanda in “Amanda’s Dream” and Rachel O’Neill in a screenplay: “Peace in the Valley.” And “Little Katie McMullen” is a stageplay based on the life of Catherine Cookson, the British novelist, from age 13 as one of the poorest of the poor to her death at 91 when she was ranked 17 among the richest in the UK. “Opposite Ends of the Rainbow” is another stageplay about two people, dramatic opposites, and how they attempt to survive their differences in order to marry.
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“The Orphan” by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). Mademoiselle Source, a wealthy woman who had determned not to marry because, having been disfigured as a child, she believed that any man who would marry her would only do so to get her money, adopts the orphan son of a widowed neighbor who dies giving birth. Over the course of many years as the boy grew into manhood, Mademoiselle Source perceives a change in his attitude and demenaor, which concern she confides to two distant female cousins, who hope ultimately to inherit a portion of the woman’s wealth. When she is discovered murdered, the her adopted son is immediately suspected and, based upon the testimony of the two cousins regarding Mademoiselle Source’s concerns, arrested. However, having an alibi, he is acquitted and inherits the woman’s wealth as her sole heir.
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“The Potato Dealer” by William Trevor. From After Rain. 1996. 224p. Viking Penguin. In “The Potato Dealer,” an unplanned pregnancy forces a young woman into a marriage of convenience with a middle-aged potato trader. Though never loving, the union achieves a type of friendship; a friendship that is then irrevocably broken by the revelation of secrets.
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“A Psychological Shipwreck” by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). 1893. Fist appeared in The Argonaut, May 24, 1879. First anthologized in Can Such Things Be. Ambrose Bierce. 1893. 320p. Cassell Publishing Co. A ghost story concerning two friends, two ships, one’s fiancee, and a transatlantic crossing. About the Author: Ambrose Bierce never owned a horse, a carriage, or a car; he was a renter who never owned his own home. He was a man on the move, a man who traveled light: and in the end he rode, with all of his possessions, on a rented horse into the Mexican desert to join Pancho Villa—never to return. Can Such Things Be? Once William Randolph Hearst—Bierce’s employer, who was bragging about his own endless collections of statuary, art, books, tapestries, and, of course real estate like Hearst Castle—once William Randolph Hearst asked Bierce what he collected. Bierce responded, smugly: “I collect words. And ideas. Like you, I also store them. But in the reservoir of my mind. I can take them out and display them at a moment’s notice. Eminently portable, Mr. Hearst. And I don’t find it necessary to show them all at the same time.” Such things can be. twenty-four tales of the weird by Ambrose Bierce, renowned master of the macabre.
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Quiet Little Woman, The by Louisa May Alcott. 1999. Illustrated by C Michael Dudash. 32p. Honor Books; Also published in The Quiet Little Woman: A Christmas Story. 2000. 122p. Honor Books. Louisa May Alcott’s Lost Christmas Treasure. “If someone would only come and take me away! I’m so tired of living here I don’t think I can bear it much longer,” Patty cries. Patty’s life in an orphanage is a dark world with little hope, beauty, or love. Even after a family finally does come for Patty, it is only because they need a servant. But there is one person who does care about Patty. And soon Patty’s life will never be the same! Honor Books is pleased to present Louisa May Alcott’s newly discovered literary treasure as a book publishing first! In the 1870s, Louisa May Alcott made friends with five earnest fans of her best-selling Little Women. The young Lukens girls had written to Miss Alcott telling her that they were so inspired by the examples of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, that they, too, were launching their own literary publication which the dubbed Little Things. Soon the Lukens girls received a very special gift—a Christmas story from Miss Alcott (which was originally titled “Patty’s Place”) about a lonely orphan girl who finds a family to love her. Following its initial publication in the Lukens’ privatyely distributed “fanzine,” the story was reprinted in 1920 in the more widely circulated St. Nicholas magazine, where it remained undiscovered until many years later, when researcher Stephen Hines chanced upon it. The story was subsequently published in a collection with two of Alcott’s other holiday stories: “Rosa’s Tale,” and “Tilly’s Christmas.”
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“A Relative Stranger” by Charles Baxter. From A Relative Stranger. 1990. 223p. WW Norton & Co, Inc. Also published in The Graywolf Annual Eight: The New Family, edited by Scott Walker. 1991. 352p. Graywolf Press. Set in the Michigan landscape that Charles Baxter has made his own, these thirteen exquisite stories illuminate the often curious connections of relatives and strangers. “You can’t just get a brother off the street,” says the narrator of the title story, but indeed he does. In another, a woman tries to elude her lover’s voice by spending an entire day without words. A marriage is jostled by the departure of a friend during a snowstorm. Baxter’s stories tend to be love stories, but it is love tinged with fear, even danger, where shock, comedy, and love combine in unexpected ways.
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“Schools & Schools” by O. Henry [psuedonym of William Sydney Porter] (1862-1910). First published in The Munsey Magazine, Oct. 1908. First anthologized in Options. 1909. 323p. Harper & Bros. The adopted son of a wealthy New Yorker finds a bride.
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“Side Exit” by Daithidh MacEochaidh. Published in Ideas Above Our Station. Ian Daley, ed. 2007. 224p. Route Publishing. From Kirkus Reviews: A collection of 15 short and rough-edged stories, first published in the U.K. The contributing writers were asked to pen stories that would make good travel reading. The editor favors first-person narrators, some of whom just want to vent. There’s the female attendant in an underground restroom (“In Attendance,” by Paula Rawsthorne), who, after losing home and husband, lives illegally in a supply closet; the tale’s grimness feels self-indulgent. Almost as grim but much more lively is the Asian-British cab driver’s situation in M.Y. Alam’s “Taxi Driver”; he’s working in a part of Yorkshire unsettled by the arrest of terror suspects. The young widow in Tania Hershman’s “On a Roll,” rather than bemoaning her fate, actually has a story to tell, and it’s a good one, about a dream on a transatlantic flight and its outcome in a Vegas casino. Another engaging story, the cream of the crop, is Sophie Hannah’s “Always Swing Upright.” Sonia is traveling by train to give a lecture on happiness; her eventful journey will reveal that, for her, the greatest rush comes from an act of pure folly. Far less successful are the portraits of a lesbian, consumed by airport angst, waiting for the return of her lover (“Missing You,” by Rosa Ainley), and the addled museum ticket clerk with a whimsical project (“Aubrey,” by Alexis Clements). The third-person narratives don’t fare well either. The meeting between biological father and the son he gave up for adoption in “Side Exit,” by Daithidh MacEochaidh, is too heavy-handed, as is Nathan Ramsden’s “The Categories of Ernest Bookbinder,” about a man headed for the asylum. The husband and wife whose marriage is breaking up in Penny Aldred’s “It’s a Hard Rain,” meanwhile, are too generic. Hats off, though, to Anthony Cropper; his very short “Love of Fate,” almost all dialogue, is a perfect snapshot of a small boy and one of his mother’s lovers enjoying each other’s company. There’s more chaff than wheat in this uneven book.
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Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. Harold Brodkey. 1988. 320p. Random House. From Kirkus Reviews: This big hook is not The Big Book—Brodkey’s long-awaited work that’s supposed to ordain him into Prousthood. Rather, these 600 pages include most of the stories Brodkey has published since his First Love and Other Sorrows (1958), and all the contents of his fine press edition of 1985, Women and Angels. Brodkey’s stories from the ’60s, all of which first appeared in The New Yorker, display a ... More mature talent, working in fairly conventional forms. Their subject-matter—a Jew among Gentiles, the relations of children to parents, adult love affairs, an artist as a young man—suggest some of the themes that will obsess the later Brodkey, but they do not invite the same autobiographical speculation. The remaining 400 or so pages focus on, and are mostly told by, Wiley Silenowicz, who also appears under other names, including “Harold Brodkey.” “Innocence” and “Play,” two shorter pieces, are both tedious, ironically titled meditations—one describing a marathon bout of sex, and the other the narrator’s first erection and ejaculation. “Puberty” picks up this obsession with bodily change, and includes not only the exact size of the narrator’s member, but a description of his first group masturbation at Boy Scout camp. The other stories here form a self-consciously Proustian, confessional account of Wiley’s biological parents—an orthodox mother and her shady character of a husband—and Wiley’s adoptive family, which includes the domineering, emotionally exhausting Leila (or “Lila” in another piece) and his cruel and envious sister, whose viciousness is detailed in “The Pain Continuum.” Only S.L. (also called Charley), Wiley’s doting new father, provides some moments of genuine affection (”His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft”) and humor—the eponymously titled “S.L.” records much of his slangy wit. Language more or less defines the various figures in Wiley’s endless kvetch—stories that, taken together, form a depressing chronicle of midwestern middle-class Jewish life, especially as perceived by a sensitive, self-absorbed prodigy. Brodkey closes this otherwise disappointing volume with “Angel,” a virtuoso narrative about an angelic visitation during Wiley’s years at Harvard. Hardly our Proust, Brodkey lacks both the social and aesthetic sweep of the master. A literary event, poorly staged. © VNU Business Media, Inc. By the Same Author: The Runaway Soul (1991).
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“The Thing Around Them” by Marilyn Krysl. From How to Accommodate Men: Stories. 1998. 238p. Coffee House Press. Krysl perceptively chronicles the fault lines in our emotional landscape that widen and needlessly divide lovers, individuals, and communities. The volume is divided into three sections that include stories on a common theme. In the first, entitled “Glamourpuss,” six pieces—both allegorical and realistic—explore the divisions between the sexes. “Extinct Species,” for instance, is a reworking of the Creation myth, in which a man and a woman act not only as the architects of their own creation but also as its destroyers, a fate redeemed only by the affection that somehow still survives between them. An older woman in “Laissez-Faire,” the best story here, at first feels jealous of a beautiful young woman who’s flirting with her husband. But later, discovering the young woman scowling at her reflection in a restroom, the older is distressed by her own initially jealous reaction and reassures the younger that she’s beautiful and doesn’t need a man to establish her worth. The four stories of the second section,”The Island,” reflecting the writer’s experience as a Peace Corps recruit in Sri Lanka, detail the horrors of the current civil war between the Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist Sinhalese. In another fine effort, “The Thing Around Them,” a young mother whose husband was taken away by guerrillas hopes to save her son by sending him abroad for adoption. But when soldiers surround her daughter’s school, she realizes she can do little to protect her family. Finally, the three stories in “Eating God’ illustrate the divisions between spiritual and physical needs, exemplified most effectively in “Distant Lights on Water,” about a fashion designer who, moved by the plight of his ThirdWorld employees, finds a way to reconcile his art and his conscience. Intellectually provocative takes; vigorous and crafted prose.
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Touched By Adoption. Compiled by Blair Matthews. 1998. Playing With Words (Canada). Touched By Adoption is a collection of short stories written by birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents. We had over 80 submissions from across North America for this project and we’ve selected 27 stories that tell the tale of adoption from all angles and from a truly unique perspective. When I set out to do this project, it was my intention that the finished book could be useful for those parents who are considering adoption, those who have been adopted, and for those who continually deal with adoption and its effects. I’m sure you’ll agree that the stories contained in Touched By Adoption do Just that. Touched By Adoption handles the issue of adoption with an honesty and frankness you’re not likely to find in other self-help books. You’ll read stories from birth mothers, adoptees, adoptive parents, grandparents and friends that touch on every emotion that adoption creates—both the positive and the negative. Available for US $13.50 from the publisher: Playing With Words, 1020 Rose Street, Cambrudge, Ontario N3H 2G3 Canada, or call (519) 650-2547 for charge orders.
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Touched By Adoption (Vol 2). Blair M Matthews. 1999. 124pp. Playing With Words (Canada). Touched By Adoption Vol. 2 presents honest look at adoption. As people dealing with adoption and its everyday effects, we often can only see one particular angle—our own. And we sometimes walk around with the blinders on because of it. The book you’re looking at right now contains so many different angles, thoughts, opinions and feelings related to adoption. None should be viewed as “wrong.” You may not agree with the views of everyone who have shared them... I know that I certainly don’t agree with them all. But as a writer, editor, publisher, author, and adoptee, I certainly respect each and every thought expressed in this book. I have learned something from each person. And that’s really what this book is all about. Touched By Adoption Vol. 2 is a collection of short stories written by birthparents, adoptees, adoptive parents, and friends of the adoption triad. We had over 100 submissions from across North America and we’ve selected 30 stories that tell the tale of adoption from all angles and from a truly unique perspective. In all the years I’ve been a publisher, I’ve never seen a collection like this. This book does not sugar-coat the adoption issue—it’s an honest look at the feelings that adoption and all its facets creates, both the good and the bad. — Blair Matthews
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Touched By Adoption. Nancy A Robinson, ed. 1999. 350p. Green River Publishing. A collection of stories, letters and poems about adoption and representing birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents, and siblings. The collection includes stories of the early Orphan Trains, closed adoptions, searches, reunions, older adoptions, single parent adoptions, and open adoptions. Expectant parents share their fears and excitement. Seasoned adoptive parents reflect on parenthood. Adoptees searching and birth parents reflect on their experiences. No two contributions are alike. There are questions, discoveries, losses, insights, sorrows, and joys—all products of living life fully. About the Editor: Nancy A. Robinson is the mother of three children. One is adopted. She is a member of the American Adoption Congress and active and interested in the changing shape of American families. Her professional experience includes teaching, curriculum development, fund-raising, and corporate and non-profit editing and writing. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she is an editor, writer, and poet.
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We Should Never Meet: Stories. Aimee Phan. 2005. 256p. St Martin’s Press. Compelling, moving, and beautifully written, the interlinked stories that make up We Should Never Meet alternate between Saigon before the city’s fall in 1975 and present-day “Little Saigon” in Southern California—exploring the reverberations of the Vietnam War in a completely new light. Intersecting the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents, these stories dramatize the events of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans to America just weeks before the fall of Saigon. Unwitting reminders of the war, these children were considered bui doi, the dust of life, and faced an uncertain, dangerous existence if left behind in Vietnam. Four of the stories follow the saga of one orphan’s journey from the points-of-view of a teenage mother, a duck farmer and a Catholic nun from the Mekong Delta, a social worker in Saigon, and a volunteer doctor from America. The other four take place twenty years later and chronicle the lives of four Vietnamese orphans now living in America: Kim, an embittered Amerasian searching for her unknown mother; Vinh, her gang member ex-boyfriend who preys on Vietnamese families; Mai, an ambitious orphan who faces her emancipation from the American foster-care system; and Huan, an Amerasian adopted by a white family, who returns to Vietnam with his adoptive mother. We Should Never Meet is one of those rare books that truly takes an original look at the human condition—and marks the exciting debut of a major new writer for our time.
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“Wrong Time/Wrong Place” by Ed LeCrone. From Beyond the Point. 2007. 332p. Authorhouse. A terrific pounding on his farmhouse door shakes an old man, widowed and alone, from a fitful slumber. From out of the swirling snowflakes of the worst storm in decades comes a menace that the aged farmer is ill prepared to deal with. “The Sea Shell Frame.” Lyle Wingate III sets off in his 1974, MGB for a cross- country trip to California. Passing through the white-hot heat of a drought filled Kansas summer the old car gives out stranding the young traveler in a treeless expanse that offers little hope of rescue. In a desolate old house, Wingate encounters a being not of this world whose designs on his body go beyond anything his mind can imagine. “All the Pleasures of Kansas.” Asa Breen hacks out a farmstead on the trackless Northern Illinois prairie only to be caught up in an Indian invasion led by Chief Black Hawk in the spring of 1832. A chance meeting with a Potawatomi maiden saves his life and commences a post war saga in “Stillman’s Run.” Boys struggle to reach manhood and deal with the pitfalls of decision-making and romance in the stories entitled, “A Catfish is a Plain Damned Wonderment, The Rookie, and The Senior.” Ed LeCrone produces a collection of eleven short stories that are filled with twists, intrigue and unexpected endings in his second book; “Beyond the Point.” LeCrone’s writing style harkens to earlier American authors namely: William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Mickey Spillane, and the lesser-known Ambrose Bierce. LeCrone attacks the pages of each story with memorable characters and full, meaty descriptions of the environment in which they exist.
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“The Zealous Mourner” by Marly A Swick. From A Hole in the Language. 1990. 192p. University of Iowa Press. Contents: Elba—The Rhythm of Disintegration—Eating Alone—Camelot—The Zealous Mourner—A Hole in the Language—Movie Music—Monogamy. From Publishers Weekly: The 1990 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning stories in this debut collection calibrate loss and mourning. Families disintegrate: children are killed; husbands desert wives; mothers already maddened by grief can no longer care for their children and must relinquish them. Women succumb to cancer and undergo mastectomies; others, apparently intact, know that something fundamental is missing in their lives. Swick’s narrators, who range from schoolchildren to backwater spinsters and college professors, face down tragedy with a toughness conveyed with deadpan wit and grace. When in “Heart” a concerned aunt talks about a niece’s report from the school psychologist, her husband tells her, “Don’t fill her head up with all that psychiatrist talk... She got troubles enough already.” In “Eating Alone,” a widow mourns the recent death of her sister, Delphine, “until it occurred to me that maybe my husband and Delphine were together somewhere, some otherworld disco, dancing up a storm. Even dead, Delphine was probably more of live wire than I ever was.” In these 10 tales, Swick apportions weal and woe so evenly that it’s hard to know whether to cheer or cry. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
