Stuff
Product Details
Scribner, February 1999
Trade Paperback, 208 pages
ISBN-10: 0684846853
ISBN-13: 9780684846859
Description
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, Antonya Nelson's debut collection of stories displays the off-beat perceptions, the humor, and the sensibility that have won the author not only critical acclaim but a host of devoted readers.
Most of the stories in The Expendables are about marriage -- marriage in process, about to be, about not to be anymore, possibly transgressed, and decidedly not transgressed. In the title story, a teenage boy participates in the spectacle of his sister's second marriage. In "Dog Problems," a husband muses about his wife's attachment to her dog, a bond that predates their marriage and will -- he fears -- outlast it. There is the woman in "Affair Life," happily encircled by her husband and child, who still must choose between her marriage and what is not quite yet an infidelity. Ranging in setting from Atlanta to Chicago and Kansas City, from the arid Southwest to the course of a river running through Colorado canyon walls, the stories in The Expendables show our relationship with destiny, whether resisted, invented, obeyed, or forced.
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Browse Inside The ExpendablesSan Francisco Chronicle
Nelson pries at the tight and awkward knots of relationships, getting into places where tenderness and need are buried. Her eye is unflinching and her narrative touch subtle and precise.
Los Angeles Times
A fine collection...compassionate and excruciatingly realistic.
Melissa Pritchard
Chicago Tribune
With edgy wit and sweet empathy, Nelson dissects conflict between contemporary men and women.
Raymond Carver
We see what it is that the best young writers have to offer
-- a kind of pizzazz, the love of undercurrent, of voyeuristic intensity, a bewildered fascination with ritual as it has been undermined in our time.
Las Cruces Sun-News, December 15, 2009
...novels has been named one of the country's finest literary artists and awarded a $50,000 fellowship. Antonya Nelson, 48, was honored Monday night in Santa Monica, Calif., by United States Artists, an organization established in 2006 to ...
Kansas City Star, March 29, 2009
...The house Antonya Nelson shares with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and their two grown children in Las Cruces, N.M., is doeskin adobe, built in 1910, surrounded by dusty, shaded sage plants ...
Las Cruces Sun-News, March 22, 2009
...Las Cruces author Antonya Nelson and her husband, Robert Boswell, relax at home with their dog Roscoe, a Corgi. LAS CRUCES ? The house Antonya Nelson shares with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and ...
Missoulian, March 13, 2009
...LAS CRUCES, N.M. - The house Antonya Nelson shares with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and their two grown children, Noah, 18, and Jade, 21, is doeskin adobe, built in 1910, surrounded by dusty, shaded sage plants ...
Antonya Nelson's Books
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Female TroubleFemale Trouble features thirteen wise, funny, and startlingly perceptive stories about the vagaries and revelations of womanhood. Named by The New...Read More -
In the Land of MenIn this powerful collection of stories, Antonya Nelson portrays women whose lives have slipped loose from their moorings and the men who can't really...Read More
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