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204 pp, 1988
$20.00 hardcover 0-87745-216-4
Winner of the 1988 Iowa Short Fiction Award
"Sharon Dilworth's writing is animated and sympathetic, wry and aware. Her characters are vivid and unpredictable. She is able to convey a sense of life lived in time and place with great immediacy. The reader senses a complete world in the control of the author's sensibility; it is this, I think, that establishes the excellence of her work."—Robert Stone
"The stories in Sharon Dilworth's prize-winning collection are solid as ice....Dilworth writes about these people with a clean, clear understanding of the kind of cold that has crept under their skin and into their bones."—Chicago Tribune
"These are heartfelt stories, illuminations of lives shaped by place as well as time."—Publishers Weekly
In the sparsely settled hills of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, winter's toughness is matched only by the animosity and affection of its inhabitants for each other and for the land that unnerves them. In The Long White, Michigan writer Sharon Dilworth evokes a place dominated by two great lakes whose power and ferocity influence the lives of every inhabitant. The particularities of place and character come together with the clarity and exactitude of a fresh snowfall that both veils and illuminates a landscape.
Memorable in this collection is Dilworth's uncommon portrayal of the long-standing prejudice between the Finnish and Indian settlers in the Upper Peninsula as well as the unsettling rhythm of small-town life for members of each group. Dilworth also extends her storytelling to a southern island where a transplanted northerner intends to spend the rest of his life and to places common everywhere in America: an out-of-the-way restaurant where a woman runs into her ex-husband's new wife, a plane trip where a businessman talks to an Irish immigrant holding a box of photos of her deceased father, and a 4th of July picnic where a woman confronts her fear and loneliness.
Read singly these stories give the reader a snowflake's precise and individual pleasure; read together they fall upon our consciousness like a long-awaited and welcome gift. |
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