Black Elvis

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More About This Book

Overview

In this funny, touching collection about music, identity, liars, and love, Geoffrey Becker brings us into the lives of people who have come to a turning point and lets us watch as they take, however clumsily, their next steps.

In the title story, an aging black singer who performs only Elvis songs despite his classic bluesman looks has his regular spot at the local blues jam threatened by a newly arrived Asian American with the unlikely name Robert Johnson. In “Man Under,” two friends struggling to be rock musicians in Reagan-era Brooklyn find that their front door has been removed by their landlord. An aspiring writer discovers the afterlife consists of being the stand-in for a famous author on an endless book tour in “Another Coyote Story.” Lonely and adrift in Florence, Italy, a young man poses as a tour guide with an art history degree in “Know Your Saints.” And in “This Is Not a Bar,” a simple night on the town for a middle-aged guitar student and jazz buff turns into a confrontation with his past and an exploration of what is or is not real.

In his depictions of struggling performers, artists, expectant parents, travelers, con-men, temporarily employed academics, and even the recently deceased, Becker asks the question, Which are more important: the stories we tell other people or the ones we tell ourselves?

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
In twelve tightly-coiled stories, Becker (Dangerous Men, Bluestown) mines the thwarted dreams, failed relationships, and wayward lives of chronically luckless characters. The award-winning title story is a good introduction to Becker's work, featuring his recurring muse: the down-and-out musician, in this case an African-American Elvis impersonator upstaged by a Chinese Robert Johnson. "Another Coyote Story" is narrated by a Native-American writer living in Sherman Alexie's literary shadow. In "Jimi Hendrix, Blue Grass Star," a street musician fakes a brain tumor in an effort to woo a beautiful but cold violinist. In "Santorini," middle-aged and recently-dumped Laura makes a play for her best friend's much, much younger son. The cumulative effect of these stories is disheartening; protagonists always end up worse off than they were at the story's start. The rewards Becker offers readers take the form of wry humor and the occasional lapse into grace, alongside the more immediate pleasures of "cigarette and pork grease smell, of cold beers and loud music."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

Meet the Author

Geoffrey Becker is the author of one previous collection, Dangerous Men, and the novel Bluestown. E. L. Doctorow selected “Black Elvis” for The Best American Short Stories 2000. Becker is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

Table of Contents

Black Elvis 1

Know Your Saints 13

Cowboy Honeymoon 28

This Is Not a Bar 45

Iowa Winter 58

Imaginary Tucson 76

Man Under 88

Another Coyote Story 102

Jimi Hendrix, Bluegrass Star 113

Santorini 130

The Naked Man 145

Black Days 158

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