Word: powdering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most illuminating and eloquent is Tobias Wolff's explication of his short story "Powder"--which centers on a father and son's attempts at making their way home for Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. The urgency of memory, the need to mediate all the past's heart-break and humor, infuses Wolff's story with dead-pan beauty. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver's classic "Popular Mechanics" (minus the bloody conclusion) in terms of its powerful brevity, "Powder" is the best work included in the anthology...
Although "Powder" is three and half pages of genius prose--which is also included in Wolff's most recent book "The Night In Question"--it represents all the stories included this year's collection of "The Best American Short Stories." They may not all necessarily take the art of the short story to much needed, new innovative levels, but they all offering precisely crafted glimpse into the human experience that echo entire worlds and lifetimes...
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...
...thing is clear, dealing in the stock market is like sitting on a powder keg. Be careful, it's giving off sparks!" OMO AHIMIE Lagos, Nigeria...
...mainstream houses. Although he proudly claimed he had never given an advance of more than $10,000, he regularly lent money to writers who had fallen on hard times. Laughlin was a pioneer in the world of sport, founding Alta, a ski area in Utah beloved for its light powder and cheap lift tickets. In his later years, he returned to his youthful dreams of writing poetry. Just before he died, Laughlin was working on Byways, an extended narrative he was writing in a meter he had learned from Kenneth Rexroth, another New Directions poet...