Do Not Deny Me: Stories
by Jean Thompson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jean ThompsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-06-09
ISBN: 1416595635
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781416595632
- Condition: USED - Very Good
- Notes: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Do Not Deny Me: Stories
Book Review: A Great Stylist But Should Not be Compared to Alice Munro
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I was intrigued when I heard that Jean Thompson is often compared to one my favorite short story writers Alice Munro. The comparison increased my expectations and I must say here my expectations were not completely met. While Thompson writes with biting, muscular prose and finds pressure points in characters lives that are always pungent and indelible, her stories are too "slice of life" and too stagnant to compare with Munro's great stories that magically contain the density of a 300-page novel in their 20-30 pages.
I'm not going to write a plot synopsis of all 12 stories. Instead, here are some highlights:
In "Soldiers of Spiritos," English lit Professor Penrose is a decent older man who feels alienated by the phony "isms" suffusing his department. Surrounding by mountebanks, self-congratulatory charlatans, he feels more and more estranged by their phony personalities and the degradation of language that he sees in their letters and course descriptions. In a tale that is both funny and sad, we observe Professor Penrose retreat from his colleagues, writing a secret science fiction novel, Soldiers of Spiritos, in which he transposes each colleague into a grotesque sci-fi creature that encapsulates its most odious qualities. This story has an intriguing premise but story is a bit static and doesn't go anywhere leaving us with little more than a snapshot of the professor's current malaise.
In "Wilderness" 41-year-old twice divorced Anna visits her friend Lynn, married to Jay, a college researcher, in Lansing, Michigan for Thanksgiving. The economically comfortable couple seems to propel their marriage on the fumes of arrogance and suburban complacency and the story juxtaposes their luxuriant consumer lifestyle with Ted, the delusional hermit who writes letters to his ex girlfriend Anna, begging her to join him in his reclusive paradise of "self-sufficiency." Predictably, Lynn and Jay's marriage is just a scrim thinly veiling dark demons of unhappiness and betrayal. The story asks the question: Is Ted a loon living in the wilderness or does he have something more noble than the suburban trappings displayed by Lynn and Jay? The story does a good job of asking this question without preaching some simplistic answer.
In "Mr. Rat" a socially-arrested man, clearly a narcissist, gives a lame swipe at an in-office relationship in this somewhat farcical story. This first-person narrator is convincing, but the story seems too familiar.
The most timely story, and my personal favorite, "Liberty Tax," is narrated by a woman whose husband has gone broke, they are "upside down" on their house and find they can no longer by fine wines, expensive furniture, and get manicures. Her husband begins to engage in nefarious methods of income without telling his wife who finds out when she is approached by an FBI agent.
This is a very engaging collection from a topnotch short story writer, but let's be fair to Jean Thompson and stop comparing her to Alice Munro.
Summary of Do Not Deny Me: Stories
When Jean Thompson??America?s Alice Munro? (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)?is telling stories, ?You cannot put the book down? (The Seattle Times), and her superlative new collection, Do Not Deny Me, is one to be savored, word by word.
? Award-winning storyteller gaining popularity: Jean Thompson?s short fiction has been honored by the National endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; Who Do You Love: Stories was a National Book Award finalist for fiction and was promoted by David Sedaris during his own lecture tour; and Throw Like a Girl: Stories was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. The collection is also in its sixth printing, as Thompson?s longstanding critical acclaim crosses over into a popular following. Do Not Deny Me is perfectly positioned to gain an even wider audience.
? Do Not Deny Me: Here is a title that demands?and commands?attention in and of itself. Yet Thompson?s latest collection is no literary dare, delivering as it does twelve dazzling new stories that together offer, with wit, humor, and razor-sharp perception, a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day. In Thompson?s writing, The New York Times Book Review has noted, ?some of the biggest satisfactions happen line by line, thanks to Thompson?s effortless ability to tip her prose into the universal.? Thompson succeeds as ?one of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience? (The Boston Globe).
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