Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 208 pages
- Published by: Alyson Books September 1, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1593501005
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1593501006
-
Book Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 7.2 ounces
Product Description
Jim Grimsley, novelist and playwright, holds no apologies when providing the psychological reasoning for human emotions in this first-time collection of his short stories.
Jim Grimsley is a PEN/Hemingway Awardwinning author. He is senior writer-in-residence at Emory University and has been playwright in residence at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta since 1986. He also is the author of several works of fiction, including
Dream Boy (soon to be a major motion picture).
About The Author
Grimsley is the author of Dream Boy and served as playwright in residence at About Face Theatre in Chicago under a National Theatre Artist Residency.
Reader ReviewsJim Grimsley's latest book JESUS IS SENDING YOU THIS MESSAGE, with an introduction by Dorothy Allison, consists of sixteen short stories, most of them fully developed while a few are hardly more than vignettes. The truth in these dark stories-- of which the breadth of the subject matter is pretty amazing-- is not found on angels' wings. Mr. Grimsley does write about both child sexual and spousal abuse, as he has done previously, in the haunting "Silver Bullet" But in "Unbending Eye" he grapples with the ethical question of whether or not scientists have the right to revive someone from the dead and keep him as a virtual prisoner because their experiments "could be of benefit to billions of people." The narrator in "Wendy," in a story as macabre as Joyce Carol Oates' tale of a robot-like Emily Dickinson in "Wild Nights" creates a machine that is in essence an eight-year-old girl. The first line of "We Move In A Rigorous Line" says it all: "He sat in an airplane heading helplessly out to sea." An incapacitated pilot and his passenter, "some rich bigwig from an oil company," face certain death as their plane loses cabin pressure. In "New Jerusalem," Lomax, an artist who walks with crutches, dreams of taking a one-way trip to the moon, not in keeping with her fundamentalist mother's world view: "I don't know why she talks like that. I take her to church." Lomax takes quite a different trip, however, and meets a fate forewarned of by a strange woman named Estabelle who tells her: "The handwriting is on the wall." The two best stories are "The Virtual Maiden" and "Jesus Is Sending You A Message" that are as good as anything else Mr. Grimsley has written, including DREAM BOY and WINTER BIRDS. In the first story two men living together hire a woman with Down syndrome to clean their cluttered, messy home. A gesture of kindness on the part of the younger man, who is more than twenty years younger than his lover, results in an unexpected complicated love triangle. The author writes beautifully and with tremendous insight about the human heart. The older narrator on his lover Randall: "The first morning we were ever together, when we had made love very sweetly and I understood how thoughtful he was, I already knew he would never love me very much, but that he would never love me any less than that." In "Jesus Is Sending You This Message," a near perfect short story set in Atlanta, the narrator, a white daily train rider, becomes obsessed and angry with an older well-dressed black woman who is compelled to testify in a loud voice on a daily commute of the imminent return of Jesus and the destruction of the wicked. The narrator, who attends a local Episcopal church, wonders if the testifier's Christ is more real than his. Mr. Grimsley dedicates "New Jerusalem" to Flannery O'Connor, who would be pleased with that story and with "Jesus Is Sending You This Message" as well as several of the other stories included here. After all, it was she who opined that Southerners write about freaks so often because they can still recognize them. Mr. Grimsley obviously is the literary child of Ms. O'Connor.
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