e-Book Red Stick Men: Stories download

by Tim Parrish

ISBN: 1578062632
ISBN13: 978-1578062638
Language: English
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi; First Edition edition (August 28, 2000)
Pages: 227
Category: Short Stories and Anthologies
Subategory: Literature

Gritty short stories set in the haze of Baton Rouge, Louisiana

"Headlong, funny, sharply observed, the stories of Red Stick Men are a joy to read. Tim Parrish is a splendid writer with a remarkable literary future." - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

Like Mississippi River humidity, the sweat and the factory smoke of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, pervade Tim Parrish's fiction.

His characters in these nine working-class stories are by no means good-ole-boy clichés. These are blue-collar, urban southerners, trying to "do good" -- or at least to find ways of doing less damage to themselves, their co-workers, and loved ones. They are always on the verge of disasters that emanate from the hard living they endure in the city they call "Red Stick."

Five of these stories follow a family from the face-to-face racial tensions of the 1960s through the distant CNN blare of the Persian Gulf War. Plotting a family's history -- the ups and downs of a Vietnam vet, a mother with lupus, and a sensitive boy striving to understand his parents and neighbors -- this quintet has the satisfying arc of a novella.

Other stories light the panorama of Baton Rouge with a refinery-fire glow. In "Roustabout" a New Wave rocker joins an oil platform crew and loses his heart to a woman engineer and a male crewman. In "Smell of a Car" a pipe-supply worker tries to aid a gunshot victim and his daughter, only to find his own life is a shambles. In "After the River" wayward lovers find meaning in the midst of a catastrophic flood.

The absurd complexities of life in industrial south Louisiana propel these stories. Each is connected by Parrish's unique sense of Baton Rouge as an Old South city made exotic and forbidding by its New South problems -- crack houses and handguns, layoffs and grinding wages, pollution and isolation.

War, hard times, and a landscape always on the edge of apocalypse from flood and fire haunt the children and working stiffs of his stories. Parrish captures the ironic humor of people who live on oozing ground near a horizon that burns at night. His Louisiana is bizarre and beautiful, tragic and hilarious. As the writer Moira Crone says, "The whole of the book forms an expressionistic piece with a surrealistic edge. These stories just go all the way."

Tim Parrish has served as a professor and director of creative writing at Southern Connecticut State University since 1994. He has been published in numerous periodicals, including New England Review, Southern Exposure, Louisiana Literature, and Shenandoah. He lived in Baton Rouge for twenty-seven years.

Haracetys

Red Stick is English for Baton Rouge and these stories take place in the wetlands of Lousiana. The last story in this collection reads like prophetic hallucination of Hurricane Katrina -- but then every story in this book makes you ache for the places that were wiped out as if you had grown up there. Very few writers can create characters out of the dirt of some obscure landscape as if they were God -- Faulkner, Steinbeck -- and at the same time make you feel you've know them all your life. The strongest part of the book is a cycle of stories about a family -- all of their relationships are palpable, and you miss them when the stories are over. There is a unusual texture of suspense to Parrish's writing -- even though the stories are not narrative they are filled with dramatic anticipation. You go from page to page, episode to episode blinded like someone in a storm, sensing that at any moment lightning will sear through the dark and illuminate something so tender and fragile that your heart is in your throat.

Yozshugore

Tim Parrish captures the essence of all things southern, as he understands everthing, good or bad, flows downstream . Case point - the mighty Mississippi River. In lives that have arrived somewhat left of center, we are allowed to share in this intimate observation. Shattered dreams, economic hardships, run away passions, and early dead-ends all frame "misery loves company" lifestyles. Not quite the hard bite and humor as Larry Brown's "Face the Music" and "Big Bad Love", we can form fondness for his characters. A forgiving grace and compassion permeates the river bottom fog as we recognize these people as those we know - our friends, ourselves. Americans lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable today. No solutions, no excuse, just acceptance.

kewdiepie

Reading the stories of Red Stick Men gives you access to worlds remote from the babble of the Information Age. These are stories rooted firmly in places far from the glib and predictable itineraries of the Travel Channel and National Geographic. Tim Parrish recreates the toxic world of Baton Rouge with precision and poetry and populates it with characters whose fates you care about. In describing the setting so well, he takes us on a tour through the outer rings of a modern inferno, with extraordinary characters who are able to extract beauty and redemption from the most unlikely of places, through the most unlikely of acts. Here are just a few examples of Tim's descriptive power. To immerse us in the world of the welder in "Free Fall," he writes: "He drifts, returns to where he does not want to go, two hours earlier, crouched inside a chemical tank, acetylene fumes fat in his nostrils. His torch hissed like a leak from a giant balloon." In "Roustabout" Tim takes us on a different kind of cruise, to an oil production platform, where all sorts of unconventional love is flowering. Of Nikki, the sexy petroleum engineer who strips to swim with dolphins beneath the platform, he writes: "Her skin was dark except for pale stripes across her breasts and hips and her abdomen swelled out like a tiny dolphin's head." In the disturbingly powerful final story, where nature itself seems to rebel against the toxic world and folks are partying to celebrate impending doom, Tim describes water "nippy as bream's teeth." As an old friend of Tim Parrish, I'll admit I've read most of these stories before and enjoyed them. But returning to them and rereading them in this fine collection gave me an even greater appreciation of his vision and storytelling power.

Asyasya

Tim Parrish does a wonderful job of bringing his young male, and female characters to life in these stories com plete with their southern creole accents in tact. Its a book that almost any man can relate to his youth and indentify with some of the things happening in these stories. They bring back a real sence of nestalgia. They may not be of events thats actually heppened to you but they are universal enough to transend certain cultural boundries. Parrish tells some delightfull stories, not too deep or bruting just really good tales. Will the female population like it or relate as much? probably not but if you liked the movie "Stand By Me" then you will like the book too. and