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Bezig met laden... Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales: New Storiesdoor Wanda Coleman
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Audio review Titles matter. They're also devilishly hard to choose. Wanda Coleman chose shrewdly for this collection (from Billy Strayhorn's classic ballad "Lush Life"): Her stories enter the reading ear much like a Strayhorn lyric. Quiet, stylish, darkly moody - they flesh out black Los Angeles: jazz clubs, offices, card dens, suburbs and slums where men and women strive to sustain lives. Folks interested in reading Wanda Coleman's fine short story collection Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales should do themselves a big favor and first listen to "Lush Life," Billy Strayhorn's mellow, melancholy, soulful song of lost love, a jazz classic if ever there was one and the source of Coleman's title. For best results, they should try the John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman version. Like Strayhorn's ballad, Coleman's stories are filled with heartache, heartbreak, loss, regret, loneliness. These are burnt-out cases, to be sure, but these are also tales of struggling souls clinging to hope and searching for love.
Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. With this collection of thirteen new short stories, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves an exception to the rule yet again. The characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing, of potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, always simmering, as Coleman writes in the final story, ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo. Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. . Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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However, I did not enjoy most of the longer pieces to the same degree, with the exception of "Winona's Choice", in which a struggling young woman is caught between an old flame and famous actor, who re-enters her life after her husband is tragically killed, and his running buddy from childhood, who the actor envies and uses the woman against him to even an old score. The characters in the other stories were not as well developed or compelling. ( )