Research Catalog

Title

James Mason and the walk-in closet / June Akers Seese.

Author

Seese, June Akers, 1935-

Publication

Normal, IL : Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

120 pages; 23 cm

Summary

• In this collection of short fiction - two novellas and eleven short stories - June Akers Seese writes of the Sylvia Plath generation: older women who, although alienated from conventional roles, remain unliberated by the feminist movement, and are thereby stranded in silent anguish between two worlds, belonging to neither.
• Her characters in this collection of urban tales include a teacher who sleeps with a rock star on her lunch break, a defrocked priest, a saxophone player who finds a Brillo pad in his scrambled eggs, a psychiatrist whose glasses fall off his nose, and a legal secretary still in love with her estranged homosexual husband.
• Though haunted by the past, these characters experience moments when the complexities of life are distilled into something immediate and illuminating. The style is tough but lyrical, wry but compassionate. The settings are invariably urban - Chicago, Detroit, Georgetown, Atlanta, Dublin - and she fills these cities with modern men and women we recognize and pity. Her hard themes of loss, hunger, and rage break finally into a rebellious acceptance that is her work's hallmark: its everyday heroism.

Contents

James Mason and the Walk-in Closet -- Ashtrays -- The Polish Girl and the Black Musician -- A Far Cry -- Synthetics -- Four plus Bullshit -- Every House Connected -- Other People Shudder -- Emmett Till and the Men Who Killed Him -- Hildegarde's Long White Gloves -- The Other Woman -- Still in Kansas City -- Near Occasions of Sin.

ISBN

1564780406 :

LCCN

93036136

OCLC

• 28848046
• ocm28848046

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries