Word: dozen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Because brilliant writing is difficult to sustain, one usually opens a volume of short stories with the expectation that half a dozen of them will be satisfying and workmanlike, and that a couple will be duds, leaving two or three pieces of real quality to carry the book and advance the reputation of the author. But of the entire trove of qualities that distinguish Vincent Lam's first book of short stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, the most immediately conspicuous is that each and every single story in this book is a flickering, luminous...
...Canadian doctor of Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and uses his firsthand experience of the world of medicine to underpin the dozen stories in this book. The pieces are interrelated, lightly and adroitly, by the recurrence of four common characters, Fitzgerald, Chen, Ming and Sri, all doctors. In some stories, Lam writes about his characters in the third person; for others, he uses the first. In less adept hands, this technique could easily seem affected. But Lam's handling of the quickly shifting perspectives is deft and gives the collection an agreeable dynamism...
...stone's throw from the Dhangars' camp stands a tent housing a dozen men dressed all in white. They're representing the Greater Cooch Behar People's Association, which is demanding that eight districts currently divided between the states of Assam and West Bengal be recognized as a separate state of Cooch Behar. "Our language and culture are different from these states," says Babua Barman, who, along with other Cooch Behar activists, has been camping near Jantar Mantar for two years...
...hundred years ago, the New York Times described the Lily Dale Assembly, a gated compound in far western New York State, as "the most famous and aristocratic spiritualistic camp in America." Freethinking, forward-leaning, this was a place for prophets of all kinds. Susan B. Anthony visited half a dozen times; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt came, and Harry Houdini and Mae West, and seekers from around the world looking to explore the continuity between life and what locals refer to as "so-called death...
...just breathless/ I never thought that I'd catch this love bug again") before exploding into a Boston-style guitar solo that they actually earn. The playing on these songs is big and precise, the singing joyful. None of it will surprise anyone with more than a dozen albums in their record collection, but then none of it will embarrass them either...