"Whether through grief, regret, awe or great love, the characters of The World of a Few Minutes Ago find the past in their present."
The World of a Few Minutes Ago
Stories by Jack Driscoll
Paper - 9780814336120
Price: $18.95t
Published February 2012
Size: 5.5 x 8.5, Pages: 184
Series: Made in Michigan Writers Series
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Description
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| Jack Driscoll |
In The World of a Few Minutes Ago, award-winning author Jack Driscoll renders ten stories from the point of view of characters aged fourteen to seventy-seven with a consistently deep understanding of each character’s internal world and emotional struggles. All of the stories are set against the quiet, powerful northern Michigan landscape and share a sense of longing, amplified by the beautiful but often unforgiving surroundings. With keen attention to the nuances of his characters and their lives, Driscoll explores both their attachments to the past and their as-yet-unseen futures as he considers relationships between loves, old friends, and parents and their children.
A twelve-year-old boy accompanies his father on a secret run to the slaughterhouse where he recently lost his job. A middle-aged divorcé waits to witness the execution of the man who murdered his daughter decades earlier. A seventy-seven-year-old man reassesses both his fifty-year marriage and his career as an AP war photographer. A sixteen-year-old girl drives through a snowstorm in a clandestine meeting with her driver’s education instructor. A twentysomething couple breaks into houses to ignite the passion in their relationship. Each story is carefully crafted and lovingly delivered, as characters weigh their own feelings against their complicated perceptions of other people and the action swirling around them. Driscoll’s Michigan shapes these people as surely as their grief and joy, as the setting often becomes a physical touchstone to which characters turn to navigate the immensity of the unknown universe.
Few authors have the flexibility of voice and the emotional range and depth of Driscoll, who is at his best in this collection. Readers of fiction will enjoy The World of A Few Minutes Ago.
For more information on Jack Driscoll please click here.
Published by Wayne State University Press
Author(s)
Jack Driscoll is the author of four novels, four poetry collections, and the AWP Short Fiction Award winner Wanting Only to Be Heard. He has also received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award, Pushcart Prizes, PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and Best American Short Story citations. He currently teaches in Pacific University’s acclaimed low-residency MFA program in Oregon.
Reviews
“With a good dose of thought and common sense approached all throughout, “The World of a Few Minutes Ago” is a fine assortment from an experienced and multiple award-winning writer.”
— James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review,
“Driscoll's stories are masculine in the best sense of that word. They have a brusque, buttoned-up quality that relaxes only sporadically to let the inner lives of their characters, men who don't wear their disappointments on their flannel sleeves, briefly shine through.”
— Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune
“You don’t have to read Jack Driscoll’s author’s blurb to know he’s a poet. Open The World of a Few Minutes Ago to any story—any sentence—and savor the rich language and rhythms, the words that sing on the page."
— Sharon Harrigan, The Nervous Breakdown
“Ludicrous and tragic predicaments become vehicles for profound awakenings in Driscoll’s suspenseful, incisive, and compassionate stories of camouflaged wisdom."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Fans of the work of Lee K. Abbott and the late, legendary Barry Hannah will find much to savor in Jack Driscoll’s colorful stories of hope and despair. His characters may feel lost and crushed under the weight of their lives, but their plight is recognizable and deeply familiar to us all.”
— Lee Polevoi, ForeWord Reviews
"Few authors possess the range or emotional depth that one finds in Jack Driscoll’s new story collection, The World of a Few Minutes Ago. Whether writing from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy accompanying his father on a secret run to the slaughter house, or a seventy-year-old man reassessing both his fifty-year marriage and career as a war photographer, or a sixteen-year-old girl driving through a snowstorm with her driver’s ed instructor, Driscoll manages to seat the reader in the lives of his characters with grace, despite a roughness that often characterizes their lived experience."
— Jeremiah Chamberlin, Fiction Writers Review
"In ‘Prowlers,’ Reilly Jack's wife has an itch for trespassing, which he anxiously follows while measuring his wild love against her wild habits. In ‘Wonder,’ a man returns to Petoskey after a short stint in prison and searches for his childhood best friend. Charlene, in ‘Saint Ours,’ navigates the violence of romance, north country winter and possibilities yet un-lived. Whether through grief, regret, awe or great love, the characters of The World of a Few Minutes Ago find the past in their present."
— Detroit Free Press, February 26, 2012
“Jack Driscoll is Michigan’s national treasure, our state secret and seer, who knows everything about us, our stars “aglitter like. . . flecks of mica” above our stale marriages and illusions of our own toughness, our wild women and our men carefully backing away from them, our lost or flown children, our broken hearts and homophobia, our snows, barrooms, and secretive waterways, our underachievers of every description. Thank God we have a new collection from Driscoll to ponder in these hard times or how we would we know ourselves? His ruthless honesty, as always, is a comfort.”
— Jaimy Gordon
“Reading Jack Driscoll's The World a Few Minutes Ago feels like a trip through a museum of portraits, each story a finely observed and carefully rendered life as distilled in a telling moment. This writer knows not only what makes people tick, but how to turn the reader's eye to the most salient and stirring instant of recognition.”
— Antonya Nelson
“Jack Driscoll has long been one of this country's best short story writers, and this book confirms it. Each enthralling story in The World of a Few Minutes Ago is filled with lyrical energy and vivid insight. A marvelous, show-stopping performance.”
— Brady Udall
“Jack Driscoll's insight into ‘the complex repertoire of human grief’ and his empathy for characters confronted with 'the debris of human misery' is singular. We encounter many of his characters—skittish and sometimes feeling forsaken—looking back over the trail of their lives and trying to plan a workable future in the wake of some kind of bad accident. Strung out as they are between desire and despair, they have in Driscoll their deft and savvy guardian.”
— Barry Lopez