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    Bear and His Daughter: Stories
    Unavailable
    Bear and His Daughter: Stories
    Unavailable
    Bear and His Daughter: Stories
    Ebook237 pages3 hours

    Bear and His Daughter: Stories

    By Robert Stone

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From a National Book Award winner, “a volume of short stories that belongs alongside Raymond Carver . . . brilliant, moving, often gloriously funny” (The San Francisco Chronicle).

    Spanning nearly thirty years in the career of the New York Times–bestselling author of Dog Soldiers, the stories collected here explore, acutely and powerfully, the humanity that unites us.
     
    In “Miserere,” a widowed librarian with an unspeakable secret undertakes an unusual and grisly role in the anti-abortion crusade. In his classic story “Helping,” the author examines a moment of climactic confrontation in the life of Elliot, a therapist beset by his own demons. “Under the Pitons” is the harrowing story of a reluctant participant in a drug-running scheme and the grim and unexpected consequences of his involvement. The title story is a riveting account of the tangled lines that weave the relationship of a father and his grown daughter.
     
    In these stories, Robert Stone’s characters tug at the edges of experience, laying bare the truths that keep us alive.
     
    “Stone, one of contemporary fiction’s big talents, probes his characters to the existential core. At stake in these dazzling stories is nothing less than his characters’ souls.” —People
     
    “The landscapes of drug addiction and war and its aftermath are depicted with rueful wit and furious intensity in these seven strongly imagined tales. . . . Combining Hemingway-like vigor with Kafkaesque despair . . . Stone has few contemporary peers, and no superiors.” —Kirkus Reviews
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 14, 1998
    ISBN9780547630519
    Unavailable
    Bear and His Daughter: Stories
    Author

    Robert Stone

    ROBERT STONE (1937–2015) was the acclaimed author of eight novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2007.

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    Reviews for Bear and His Daughter

    4/5

    32 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Quite a decent collection of short stories from Stone. The titular story, and a few others, really stick out as exemplars in both the art of the short story and of narrative themselves. Others fall a little by the wayside, but I do believe this collection will be interesting to those into short stories and American literature.3.5 stars.
    • 5/5
      If you've read a lot of Robert Stone, it's easy to go through "Bear and His Daughter" looking for precursors or sequels to his better-known novels. So let's get it over with: "Porque no Tiene, Porque le Falta" and "Under the Pitons" echoes the menacing tropical setting of "A Flag for Sunrise", while the former and "Aquarius Obscured" both tap the same vein of post-sixties malaise that made "Dog Soldiers" so darkly seductive. There are other connections to be made, but it's "Miserere," the collection's first story, that hits hardest. In it, a woman who's suffered an unimaginable family tragedy is theological extremes and political radicalism, but what makes the story really special is how ordinary, perhaps even logical, Stone makes the journey sound. The story features some frankly shocking emotional cruelty, but it also seems to typify what is often the default position for many of Stone characters: a sort of stunned emotional numbness combined with a determination to persevere using whatever tools are at hand. Stone, who worked in the gutter press as a young man, might be accused of wallowing in lurid subject matter, but, when one considers his characters' unexpected capacity for resilience, "wallowing" seems to wrong term to use here. I get the sense, after reading these stories again for the first time in perhaps twenty years, that he genuinely admires many of characters' tenaciousness. I'd never call any of these stories "uplifting," mind you, but their continued survival often seems like a small victory in itself. This may make the last story in this collection, which describes a poet, near the end of his creative rope and haunted by a poem that he wrote and forgot years ago, trying to reconcile with his daughter, a park ranger who's fonder of methamphetamines than she should be, so affecting and so effective. Stone's always specialized in the sad decline of movements -- like Hunter S. Thompson, he's not a sixties writer as much as an end-of-the-sixties writer, but I was impressed how easily Stone adapted to a new temporal setting in this little novella. Bear's daughter does her drugs at work, in her uniform, and Bear himself ruminates on how the end of the Cold War, along with the inevitable passage of time, has dented his reputation. The emotional interplay between these two characters is, I suppose, shocking, as is its ending, and I suppose that that's part of the attraction here, but that's not the real reason that I spend my time reading this author. Recommended, but, as always, readers seeking either moral instruction or mere misery porn should probably look elsewhere. There's a lot of white-knuckle courage on display in these stories, but no real heroes.