Small Craft Warnings: Stories

Front Cover
University of Nevada Press, 1998 - Fiction - 180 pages
The indigo skies and lush vegetation of the contemporary West Coast belie the damaged souls and desperate alienation that lurk behind fading stucco walls and off the endless highways. The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these brilliant stories by award-winning novelist and poet Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman's characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The protagonist of "Pagan Night" waits with her unnamed and unwanted infant in a shabby zoo in Idaho while her partner buys dope and makes plans to reconstitute their failed rock band. And the precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has so enjoyed. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror. Braverman's language is ripe, intense, as vivid as the sun-drenched California landscape, and her characters are contrary, unpredictable, and unforgettable. These haunting stories evoke the glittering expectations and shattering disappointments of the postmodern West.

From inside the book

Contents

Small Craft Warnings
1
Hour of the Fathers
19
They Take a Photograph of You When
35
Copyright

8 other sections not shown

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About the author (1998)

Kate Braverman was born on Febraury 5, 1949 in Philadelphia. She has a BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Los Angeles, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program. She also taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. Her novels include: Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Wonders of the West and the Incantation of Frida K. She passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico.on October 13, 2019 at the age of 70.

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