Here's another book, this one published by HarperCollins, 2004. I think I really like this John Murray. Lyrical and scientific and perceptive and diagnostic and meaningful and real and beautifully capturing the beauty within unbeautiful lives. Moving stories of people on the move.
Murray trained as a doctor and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. He won the Prairie Lights Short Fiction Award for "The Hill Station," and the title story was included in the Best New American Voices 2002, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Apparently he currently lives in Iowa, but we don't have to hold that against him.
Check out the publisher's offering:Murray trained as a doctor and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a teaching-writing fellow. He won the Prairie Lights Short Fiction Award for "The Hill Station," and the title story was included in the Best New American Voices 2002, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Apparently he currently lives in Iowa, but we don't have to hold that against him.
Stuff about Butterflies from Barnes & Noble.com
Synopsis
In this remarkably assured debut collection, doctors, scientists, explorers, and collectors face the emotional battles of love, loss, and obsession in exotic locations.
reviewed in The New York Times
Like his characters, Mr. Murray, who trained as a doctor before he became a teaching-writing fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has a fascination with detail, with the tiny, distinguishing specifics that can reveal a person's mood, presage an illness or define a place. Many of his people in A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies focus on details as a way of achieving detachment, but in Mr. Murray's case, his orchestration of psychological and physical details results in stories that are as affecting as they are suspenseful. The best of these tales combine the narrative tension of an old-fashioned yarn with the emotional density of Alice Munro's fiction, compressing entire lives into a handful of pages while exposing the secrets and nightmares that connect one family member to another — Michiku Kakutani
If you have read this book, or anything else by Murray, let me know what you think. And as always, feel free to comment on this or any other posting of mine. Do so by clicking the little tiny comment icon below each article. Thanks for participating in The Rutabaga Harvest Law Journal! --Chuck
No comments:
Post a Comment