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    Mendocino Fire: Stories
    Mendocino Fire: Stories
    Mendocino Fire: Stories
    Audiobook8 hours

    Mendocino Fire: Stories

    Written by Elizabeth Tallent

    Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers and Jeff Cummings

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work, appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise.

    Now, at long last, Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explores moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In this audiobook, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone.

    With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9781511309226
    Mendocino Fire: Stories
    Author

    Elizabeth Tallent

    Elizabeth Tallent, author of a novel and four story collections, has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Tin House, and ZYZZYVA as well as in the Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, O. Henry Prize, and Pushcart Prize award anthologies. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives with her wife, an antiques dealer, on the Mendocino Coast.

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    Reviews for Mendocino Fire

    3.5/5

    8 ratings1 review

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    • 5/5
      Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent is a very highly recommended collection of ten short stories.

      The stories capture relationships and lives during times of transformation with clarity and insight into the complicated emotional landscape of all relationships. Tallent explores relationships between genders, with an emphasis on female relationships, as well as broken marriages. Many of the stories deal with creative people, writers, artists, or ecological/environmental activists. Several are set on university campuses or have a tie in to academia. Almost all of the stories involve exes, severed relationships, struggling relationships. The emotions run high as we hear the inner thoughts of the characters struggling to make sense of their lives, actions, obsessions, and circumstances. Tallent describes lives that are messy, with emotional fallout and struggles.

      All of these stories are extremely well written with exceptionally descriptive prose and phrasing. There are several passages I marked to take note of in my advanced reading copy. Tallent manages to capture the inner thoughts of her characters and their feelings with a clarity of emotion that is complete and realistic, but with a poetic grace and beauty of wording that often belies the raw emotions being expressed.

      I don't know if the page numbers will be similar, but the acuity and mental pictures drawn from some of her descriptions is astonishing. For example: "Tamped down love means not only sublimated energy but also a ranting, pointless impatience: before long, she's sick of obsession's two-lane Nebraska highway." (pg 79)
      Or: "It can't be true that she can't see in. That she can't know the story. This is her life she's been shut out of!"(pg. 97) And on the next page "Divorce is not linear. One morning there is peace of mind, the next there is wrath."

      Contents include:
      The Wrong Son - a young man in a working-class California fishing community has a complicated, combative relationship with his father
      Tabriza - a man wonders if a valuable rug he dug out of the trash is evil and wreaking havoc on his third marriage
      Mystery Caller - a woman places calls to her first husband but doesn't actually talk to him
      Eros 101 - an female professor is obsessed/in love with her female student
      Nobody You Know - recently divorced woman travels halfway across the country and meets her ex's new, young wife
      The Wilderness - musings of an English professor
      Never Come Back - parents have their son's pregnant girlfriend and subsequent grandchild continue to live with them after the girlfriend takes off
      Mendocino Fire - a young eco-activist grows up in an unconventional manner
      Narrator - a young female writer falls for an older famous male writer
      Briar Switch - a woman's father is dying from lung cancer and she's has to drive through a blizzard to get to him

      Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from Harper Collins and TLC for review purposes.