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The Devil's Tub

Collected Stories

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the pages of the New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, "Edward Hoagland's collected stories are dazzling" (Ann Beattie).

Saul Bellow called him "one of the very best writers of his generation." Newsweek praised him as "a marvelous writer." Edward Hoagland, renowned travel writer and essayist, is also an extraordinary writer of fiction, as readers of his stories "The Final Fate of Alligators" and "Kwan's Coney Island" can attest. Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to the present. First published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Esquire, American Review, and Saul Bellow's famous literary magazine, The Noble Savage, and widely anthologized, in The Best American Short Stories among others, Hoagland's work continues to amaze readers with evocative prose and finely etched characters.

There are the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese laundry worker in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, and a washed-up boxer trying to hang on to his career. From the cramped and gritty streets of New York City to the wide open spaces of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, create, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.
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    • Booklist

      November 15, 2014
      Earthy and cerebral, curious and empathic toward animals as well as human beings, Hoagland mines deep veins of experience in his essays and fiction, from his time with the circus to his extensive travels and struggles with physical ailments. His last book was the lacerating novel Children Are Diamonds (2013). In this collection, readers will discover the intensity and wisdom of Hoagland's muscular short stories, which span 50 years. These are visceral tales of men living bruising lives of toil and risk, hardscrabble freedom and precarious love. Hoagland portrays carnies spoiling for a fight, hobbled rodeo cowboys, a former sailor living in a New York apartment with an alligator, a Vermont auctioneer with suspect sidelines, and, in the title story, a philosophical motorcycle daredevil. Each masterful story whips up a seething storm of consciousness as memories collide with current conundrums and Hoagland's battered characters try to figure out their next move. Flush with life, these knowing and passionate tales are the work of a tremendous writer whose literary power flows from the hot springs that fuel America's greatest fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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