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Goodbye, Son and Other Stories
Janet Lewis
€ 28.03
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Description for Goodbye, Son and Other Stories
Hardback. Num Pages: 221 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 230 x 150. Weight in Grams: 363.
Good-bye, Son and Other Stories, Janet Lewis’s only collection of short fiction, was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death. A mother’s encounters with her deceased son, an aging woman sitting with the new knowledge of her troubled older sister’s death, and a teenager disillusioned by her own mortality are among the characters, mostly women and girls, whom Lewis delivers. Her understated style and knack for unadorned observation embed us with them as they reckon with the disquieting forces—incomprehensible and destructive to some, enlightening to others—that move us from birth, through life, to death. In the process, Lewis has crafted a paean to the living.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
1985
Publisher
Ohio University Press United States
Number of pages
221
Condition
New
Number of Pages
224
Place of Publication
Ohio, United States
ISBN
9780804008679
SKU
V9780804008679
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Janet Lewis
Janet Lewis was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose literary career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. The New York Times has praised her novels as “some of the 20th century’s most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature.” Born and educated in Chicago, she lived in California for most of her adult life and taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Her works include The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946), and Poems Old and New (1982).
Reviews for Goodbye, Son and Other Stories
“Any consideration of the writing of Janet Lewis becomes inevitably a consideration of style. In Good-bye, Son, she exhibits a classical purity that is rare.”
New York Times
“The collection may remind you of some of the quiet stories of Willa Cather.”
The New Yorker
“(Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories) is … an unaccountably neglected book, a collection [that explores] the apprehension and experiencing of death, and the consolatory power inherent in understanding one’s place and part in the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”
Christian Science Monitor
“(Janet Lewis) is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.”
Larry McMurtry
New York Review of Books
“[Lewis] thrusts us into the essence of a situation, startling us out of the role of complacent observer and into that of active participant. This steady movement and these brief revelations work together to give the stories a collective meaning.”
Deanna L. Kern Ludwin
Western American Literature
“Janet Lewis…has now written some very fine short stories, of which at least one (‘Good-bye, Son,’ the title story or novelette), I predict will live a long time, not only in memories, but in the anthologies of outstanding short prose in which it is bound to turn up. It is a story not easily classifiable among the different kinds of supernatural tales; it is, in essence, a story of divine guidance, and as such has nothing but the appearing of the dead in common with the usual ‘ghost story.’”
L. T. Nicholl
Weekly Book Review
New York Times
“The collection may remind you of some of the quiet stories of Willa Cather.”
The New Yorker
“(Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories) is … an unaccountably neglected book, a collection [that explores] the apprehension and experiencing of death, and the consolatory power inherent in understanding one’s place and part in the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.”
Christian Science Monitor
“(Janet Lewis) is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.”
Larry McMurtry
New York Review of Books
“[Lewis] thrusts us into the essence of a situation, startling us out of the role of complacent observer and into that of active participant. This steady movement and these brief revelations work together to give the stories a collective meaning.”
Deanna L. Kern Ludwin
Western American Literature
“Janet Lewis…has now written some very fine short stories, of which at least one (‘Good-bye, Son,’ the title story or novelette), I predict will live a long time, not only in memories, but in the anthologies of outstanding short prose in which it is bound to turn up. It is a story not easily classifiable among the different kinds of supernatural tales; it is, in essence, a story of divine guidance, and as such has nothing but the appearing of the dead in common with the usual ‘ghost story.’”
L. T. Nicholl
Weekly Book Review