Cities in the sea / Maura Stanton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stanton, Maura.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

Michigan literary fiction awards

Language:

English

Genre:

Electronic books.

Short stories.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (131 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2003.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

In Cities in the Sea, Maura Stanton taps into the mysterious force of the fairy tale, with its rhyming images and magic patterns. Hans Christian Andersen shows up as a character in one story, and his imagination and ability to reveal the truth through tale-telling sets the tone for the other stories in this collection, which explore the unstable, dangerous world beneath the calm surface of everyday existence.

These stories, set in the Midwest and the Southwest, in Florida and in Europe, blur the boundaries between fairy tale and verite. A range of characters -- from a businessman to a pianist, from a county coroner to a hardware store clerk, from a Greek immigrant to a Danish artist -- come to discover that the past is a ruined kingdom, lost forever, but still a place to visit in wish, dream, and memory.

"I am incapable of doing good work unless it contains an element of the fairy tale," the film director Jean Renoir says in his autobiography. In the same way, Cities in the Sea attempts to wrest a deeper pattern, full of humor and wonder, out of the disturbing events of contemporary life.

Contents:

Glass house

Sketching Vesuvius

Applause

Neptune's palace

Mean old Daddy

Tristan and Isolde

Limbo

The house of Cleopatra

The nightingale

Traps.

Notes:

Short stories.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

047211364X

9780472021666

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.17673

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.