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To be a man : stories /

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2020Edition: First editionDescription: 229 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780062431028
  • 0062431021
Uniform titles:
  • Short stories. Selections
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 813/.6 23
LOC classification:
  • PS3611.R38 A6 2020
Contents:
Switzerland -- Zusya on the roof -- I am asleep but my heart is awake -- End days -- Seeing Ershadi -- Future emergencies -- Amour -- In the garden -- The husband -- To be a man.
Summary: The National Book Award finalist explores contemporary gender realities in a collection of short fiction that traces the experiences of diverse characters at various stages of life.
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Holdings
Item type Current library Home library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Standard Loan Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Fiction Coeur d'Alene Library Book KRAUSS (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 50610022770072
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

O, The Oprah Magazine's 20 Best Titles of the Year

Time Magazine's 100 Books to Read in 2020

Financial Times' Best Books of 2020

Esquire's Best Books of 2020

New York Times Editors' Choice

Lit Hub's Best Books of 2020

Bustle's Best Short Story Collections of 2020

Electric Literature's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020

Library Journal's Best Short Stories of 2020

"Superb. . . . Krauss's depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers." --Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review

"From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction." --Esquire

In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.

The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

Switzerland -- Zusya on the roof -- I am asleep but my heart is awake -- End days -- Seeing Ershadi -- Future emergencies -- Amour -- In the garden -- The husband -- To be a man.

The National Book Award finalist explores contemporary gender realities in a collection of short fiction that traces the experiences of diverse characters at various stages of life.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Switzerland (p. 1)
  • Zusya on the Roof (p. 21)
  • I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake (p. 39)
  • End Days (p. 59)
  • Seeing Ershadi (p. 93)
  • Future Emergencies (p. 113)
  • Amour (p. 131)
  • In the Garden (p. 143)
  • The Husband (p. 159)
  • To Be a Man (p. 199)
  • Acknowledgments (p. 227)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In a first collection, National Book Award finalist Krauss (Great House) uses superbly controlled language to investigate how we become who we are. Having cheated death, elderly scholar Brodman feels his understanding of the world slipping away and ends up on the roof with his newborn grandson, while florist's assistant Noa faces the exigencies of her parents' divorce, the wedding she's supplying, and nearby California wildfires. Elsewhere, a woman recalls a teenage friend, heedless of the risks she took because "she was already broken, or she wasn't going to break." In one striking story, a woman who inherits the apartment of a father she barely visited learns that it's used by her father's old friend whenever he's in town: "I will get used to stepping over the stranger on my way to the kitchen because that is the way one lives." VERDICT Small gems, large ideas; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/6/20.]

Publishers Weekly Review

This triumphant first collection from Krauss (Forest Dark) crisscrosses the globe in 10 ambitious stories written over two decades that wrestle with sexuality, desire, and human connection. In one of the greatest stories, "Seeing Ershadi," a dancer believes she spies the star of the Iranian film Taste of Cherry while in Japan for a performance, and believes she must save the actor from the suicide he commits in the film. After a friend tells her of her own unique encounter with the actor years earlier, the dancer faces the depth of her fanatic and obsessive state. Another highlight, "Future Emergencies," is set shortly after 9/11 and remains timely as its female protagonist navigates a New York City where gas masks are distributed for free and local governments warn of vague threats. "I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake," another standout, concerns a woman visiting her dead father's apartment in Tel Aviv, only to find a stranger living in a back room, and the collection's title story breaks a woman's interactions with several men into four parts to ruminate on gender norms and expectations. Krauss's style is marked by a willingness to digress into seemingly superfluous details, yet the minutiae helps the author conjure a series of realistic environments, allowing each story feel lived in. This is a spectacular book. (Nov.)

Booklist Review

What defines a life well-lived? What does it take for a chance encounter that turns into a friendship developed over the course of one summer to make its presence felt decades on? Krauss (Forest Dark, 2017) winningly explores these and other weighty issues in a home run of a short story collection. The characters frequently struggle under the burden of familial guilt compounded by geography. In "The Husband," a U.S.-based psychiatrist confronts her feelings of hopelessness and jealousy as her aged mother finds new love in Israel. In "I Am Asleep But My Heart Is Awake," a daughter makes peace with her father's death and peeks into a vision of his life beyond one that she had made room for. Jewish themes flow through many stories, most strikingly in "In the Garden," where a horticulture apprentice finds out that "Latin America's greatest landscape architect" was a Nazi agent. Above all, these stories pay homage to strong women. As female characters mature, they find resilience in the power they wield despite societal constraints. Like the narrator in "Seeing Ershadi," all of Krauss' women characters women eventually realize that their triumphs are due to "strengths we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths."

Kirkus Book Review

Stories about women and men and the daily urgencies inherent to living more or less in the present. The latest collection of stories from Krauss is a wonder, with the author's signature straddling of the tragic and the absurd, her particularly Jewish frame of reference, and the extraordinary range of her narrative voice. One story traces the erotic awakenings of three young women; the next follows an older man named Brodman as he emerges from surgery to find his brand-new grandson about to undergo his bris. These stories are remarkable enough, but deep in the book, Krauss departs, ever so subtly, from a strict allegiance to realism. In the unsettlingly prescient "Future Emergencies," New York City residents are urged to wear the gas masks being distributed at designated centers. Nobody knows why, but the evening news is also providing instructions on how to safely seal windows and doors. "Amour" is set in a near future where whatever has happened to the world--war? devastating climate change?--goes unstated, but the main characters find themselves, as a result, in a refugee camp. And yet in both stories, the futuristic or, as it is sometimes called, "speculative" aspects are quietly located in the background. At the forefront of each is the relationship between a couple. In the end, perhaps that's what makes these tales so moving and so disconcerting. Brodman, out of surgery, realizes that "his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he'd had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years." A tremendous collection from an immensely talented writer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Nicole Krauss is an international best selling author.

The History of Love (W.W. Norton 2005) won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, France's Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger, was named #1 book of the year by Amazon.com, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes.

Nicole's first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for First Fiction. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best writers under 40. Her most recent novel is GREAT HOUSE (W.W. Norton October 2010). Nicole's books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

Krauss recently completed a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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