Ocean State

Jean McGarry author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Johns Hopkins University Press

Published:10th Sep '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Ocean State cover

The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.

McGarry's stories are psychological studies constructed around a moment of reckoning-a first date at the church social, a wedding day tomorrow, the last reveries of a dying man. She burrows deeply into the sensibilities of recognizable, ordinary people-our younger selves, sisters and brothers we could know, parents and adult children we have been or have observed. Providence Journal 2010 Exceptionally intense, intricately structured, and as arresting and consistently engaging as fractal art... the stories trace characters' sense of a double existence: the life inside family, defined and constrained by McGarry's meticulous details, and the boundless life of the spirit. Her literary progenitors range from Willa Cather to Virginia Woolf--but she brings a savage lyricism to her stories, a sense of rage contained perilously by wit and intelligence, that gives the stories a menacing aspect, like watching a man threatening suicide walk on a ledge. The Hopkins Review 2011

ISBN: 9780801896583

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 20mm

Weight: 386g

224 pages