Emperor of the air Stories

Canin's outstanding debut, winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, gathers nine stories originally published in the Atlantic, Esquire and Ploughshares, among others; two were selected for the Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1986. At 27, the gifted author, a Harvard Medical School student who was a creative writing instructor and an Iowa Review editor, informs a technical expertise with a keen sense of the dynamics of the human psyche. His far-reaching vision encompasses ``The Year of Getting to Know Us,'' where the protagonist recognizes in himself aspects of his father's disturbing uncommunicativeness, and ``American Beauty,'' where a teenager cannot escape his bitter older brother's grim prescription of life's inevitabilities: ``You're going to turn into a son of a bitch, just like me.'' Several of the marvelous tales showcase love's singular, redemptive powers: an elderly couple revives their comatose relationship in ``We Are Nighttime Travelers''; a daughter bribes a guard to release her mother who is caught shoplifting in ``Pitch Memory''; and a straight-arrow husband lies for his wife in ``Where We Are Now.'' With a fine attention to detail, Canin continually surprises readers as he casts the mundane in new light (for example, the young narrator of ``Star Food'' unloads bags of potato chips in their aluminum racks ``as if I were putting children to sleep in their beds''). (February 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This collection is the deserving winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The nine stories show their young author to be a worthy successor to such distinguished past winners as Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Penn Warren. Writing primarily in the first person, Canin speaks convincingly in a variety of fictional voices: a deprived Iowa teenager, a 69-year-old astronomy teacher, a troubled husband in southern California, a young woman harried by her mother's disappointments. Canin's ordinary Americans are memorable individuals caught in situations leading to sudden, still moments of comprehension. This is an engrossing achievement, recommended for all fiction collections.Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Winner of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, Canin is the real thing: a writer gifted with the mixture of vagrant narrative approach and unfussy lyricism that results when that rarest of all literary boons, imagination, is strongly at play. Here, there is some of the sweet stateliness of Cheever (especially in the title story: a man trying to save a cherished tree); a sure hand at family diversity (""American Beauty""--a siblings story that manages in a dozen or so pages to do what Robert Bosworth's not unimpressive Crooked Hearts needed a whole book to accomplish); and a feeling for the love and pity between children and parents that slips just under clichÉ. In ""Pitch Memory,"" a mother's shoplifting is covered for by her grown daughter, without any obvious embarrassment or hurt but as a realized favor owed; in ""The Year of Getting to Know Us,"" a tattered family's brief fling at closeness is punctured by an enormously tired yet gorgeous interchange between a father and his suspicious teen-aged son: "" '. . .You don't have to get to know me. You know why?' 'Why?' I asked. 'You don't have to get to know me,' he said, 'because one day you're going to grow up and then you're going to be me.'"" There are some weaker stories here, like ""Lies"" (all tone) and ""We Are Nighttime Travellers"" (in which Canin's unforced powers of sympathy turn overly elegiac), but this is one of the strongest first story-collections in years, from a generous writer with heart and style and the power to surprise. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.