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Black Cherries

Grace Stone Coates author Mary Clearman Blew editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Apr '03

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

Black Cherries cover

In this series of linked stories, the child narrator, Veve, cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family's life together, but by watching and listening, she pieces together a painful past

Veve cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family's life together, but by watching and listening, she pieces together a painful past. Played out against the backdrop of rural hardship and deprivation on the family's Kansas farm, the secret in her father's previous life eventually explains his harsh treatment of the three older children.In this series of linked stories the child narrator, Veve, cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family’s life together, but by watching and listening she pieces together a painful past. Played out against the backdrop of rural hardship and deprivation on the family’s Kansas farm, the secret in her father’s previous life eventually explains his harsh treatment of the three older children and her mother’s bitterness over his countless misunderstandings and slights. When originally published in 1931, a reviewer of Black Cherries commented that there is “a sharpness about all impressions in the book, a keenness of sensuous and spiritual apprehension that leaves brilliant after-images with the reader.” Another described the series of sketches as “exquisite in texture and so faithful to the childish mind that one derives a warm impression of the imagined young narrator.” Grace Stone Coates (1881–1976) spent most of her life in the tiny ranching community of Martinsdale in southwestern Montana. During a seven-year period, twenty of Coates’s short stories were cited in the annual Best American Short Stories as Distinctive or Honor Roll stories, and John Updike chose Coates’s “Wild Plums” for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century. Coates also published two collections of poetry.

"This handsome edition of Coates' most effective and moving stories has a solid and exciting introduction by Mary Clearman Blew. . . . Black Cherries is a work of genius, written in vital fluids, illuminated by lightening, quivering with truth."—Statesman Journal, Salem, OK

ISBN: 9780803264298

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 136g

99 pages