Collected Stories

by Harry Mark Petrakis

Overview

The first collection of the short stories of Harry Mark Petrakis was nominated for a National book Award in Fiction, establishing him as a master of the form. Revealing commentaries by the author introduce each story in this collection.

In The Passing of the Ice, Polish icemen suffer the fate of some great doomed Greek line. In The Song of Rhodanthe a fleeting vision of love flowers within a grim social prison. In The journal of a Wife Beater an insufferable chauvinist male discovers to his horror and bodily peril, that is wife is younger and stronger than he is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780595378432
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/14/2006
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

What People are Saying About This

Kurt Vonnegut

"I've often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Protrakis's characters. Everyone of them is at least 14 feet tall."

John Cheever

"I've always thought Harry Mark Patrokis to be a leading American novelist."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Harry Mark Protrakis is good news in American literature."

Editorial Reviews

In an unrehearsed, around-the-fire sense, Petrakis is a storyteller, concerned not with developing character or reproducing human speech, but with the tale and its moral resonance. These 37 stories, six of which are published for the first time, concern Greek grocers, tavern-keepers and shoemakers, rough men like the father in ``Dark Eye.'' Sodden with the wine called mastiha, he is unable to hold a job or deal decently with his gentle wife, but he fiercely guards his skill as a puppet-master, traditionally passed from father to son, yet in this new country doomed to die when he does. Lightening the burden of sadness carried by most of these tales, farces like ``The Wooing of Ariadne''an unabashed reworking of The Taming of the Shrewand ``The Journal of a Wife Beater'' satirize their protagonists' raucous machismo. But the author makes it clear that Greek men, in general, hide their fragile spirits beneath surface swagger, as depicted in ``The Bastards of Thanos,'' in which a dying poet is confronted by the son of one of his reckless couplings. Blunt and inelegant though the style, the bitter honesty and profound empathy that pervade these stories bring a people and a place into memorable focus. (February 15)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly