Ellen Gilchrist (1935–2024)
Autor von Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories
Über den Autor
She is the author of 16 works of fiction, including the story collection Victory Over Japan, which won the National Book Award & most recently, The Cabal & Other Stories. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Ocean Springs, Mississippi & New Orleans, Louisiana. (Bowker Author Biography)
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Zugehörige Werke
The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage (2002) — Mitwirkender — 690 Exemplare
Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature (1991) — Mitwirkender — 142 Exemplare
More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women (2004) — Mitwirkender — 64 Exemplare
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction June 1995, Vol. 88, No. 6 (1995) — Author - Black Winter — 20 Exemplare
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Wissenswertes
- Rechtmäßiger Name
- Gilchrist, Ellen Louise
- Geburtstag
- 1935-02-20
- Todestag
- 2024-01-30
- Geschlecht
- female
- Nationalität
- USA
- Geburtsort
- Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA
- Sterbeort
- Ocean Springs, Mississippi, USA
- Wohnorte
- Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA
Hopedale Plantation, Issaquena County, Mississippi
Courtland, Alabama
Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Ocean Springs, Mississippi, USA - Ausbildung
- Vanderbilt University
Millsaps College (BA | English)
University of Arkansas (Mx | English) - Berufe
- novelist
short story writer
poet - Organisationen
- University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
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I went through it with this short story collection written by Ellen Gilchrist and first published in 1981. I began the collection and was quickly enamored of the voice; it's like Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker were collaborating to have the most terrible things happen to cruel and thoughtless people. And slowly, sometime around the fourth or fifth use of the n-word, I felt qualms. 'Maybe Gilchrist is just really committed to using the words her characters, white people living in the South in the 1970s, would have used?' I rationalized, and maybe? It shows up as a descriptive term used by the omniscient narrator as well, so I will say that perhaps some short stories age better than others and there's a reason she isn't much read nowadays. And about the fourth or fifth short story I started to get tired of bad things happening to bad and careless people.
Then, two-thirds through this book about mean people the author clearly disliked, something extraordinary happened. I reached Revenge, a longer short story in which a girl is sent to spend the summer of 1942 in the South with her grandparents and her cousins, all boys, who exclude her from their project of becoming Olympic athletes. She is enraged by their behavior.
I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father's Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.
Rhoda is not exactly a sympathetic character, but Gilchrist here takes the time to inhabit her life so that I understood her frustration with being stuck inside when she really needed to run around outside. It's a great story with a fantastic ending, one that fully respects who Rhoda is. A perfect story and one I don't think I will soon forget. And, in the stories that follow, Gilchrist continues to excel, each story centering a girl unable to conform to what's expected, while still fully inhabiting the prejudices and expectations of her time and place. It's superbly well done.
How to reconcile a book of stories that have aged badly, but that include some brilliant stories? I have no idea.… (mehr)