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http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/570095

The practical heart : four novellas

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  • "A luminous quartet, five years in the writing, reveals even more fully the breathtaking range of "a storyteller in the grand tradition" (New York Times). Allan Gurganus's voice--by turn bawdy and serene, folkloric and profane--deepens as it soars into this quiet masterwork. Four new fables--rich in event, comedy, experience--surge with the force of history's headlines versus sidestreet human fortitude. Improbable heroes and heroines spiral outward from Gurganus's familiar Carolina terrain. Each fires into a wild and differing direction, all in quest of some fantasy that's practically impossible: --An impoverished immigrant has her portrait painted (or not) by John Singer Sargent. --A young man's devotion to saving eighteenth-century homes'and their odd lingering ghosts'helps him find unlikely ways to renovate his own mortality. --A pillar of the community becomes, over the course of one cartoon matinee, its pariah. --A beloved, transfixingly homely father shows his village and his only son a decency stronger than race, humiliation, or even death itself. These characters' quixotic missions prove mysterious, often even to themselves. Their legacies are not easily deciphered. And yet, their most impractical wishes soon become the heartiest facts about each. They manage to wrest battle-courage from everyday indecision. Out of superstition and convention, they lift certainty. They each find a wealth of consoling truths banked--immortal--in the all-too-human heart. Allan Gurganus's great powers--announced more than a decade ago by Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--here achieve a yearning exuberance worthy of a new Whitman. These leaps of sexual longing, empathy, and faith become a major new gift from this essential fablemaker. From the Hardcover edition."
  • "The title novella, an ode to a great aunt who takes an artistically inclined young boy under her wing and shows him through kindness the meaning of love, won the National Magazine Prize. Each of the tales explores the impact that one individual can have on another and how courage and beauty can arise from the most unexpected sources. There is the young preservationist dying of AIDS whose joy in saving old homes never falters and whose smile in the face of death continues to bring happiness to his survivors. There is the pillar of the community whose sudden disgrace confirms a young boy's determination to tell the truth, to be out in the world. Lastly, there is "Saint Monster" the amazingly "ugly" man whose love and devotion to his son transcends race, public humiliation, and even death. These stories may all arise from Gurganus's Carolina home soil, but their messages are universal in scope."

genre

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  • "Electronic books"
  • "Electronic books"@en
  • "Fiction"
  • "Fiction"@en

name

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  • "The practical heart : four novellas"
  • "The practical heart : four novellas"@en
  • "The practical heart four novellas"
  • "The practical heart four novellas"@en
  • "Practical Heart Four Novellas"@en

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