Thomas McGuane. (2015). Crow Fair: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Thomas McGuane. 2015. Crow Fair: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Thomas McGuane, Crow Fair: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Thomas McGuane. Crow Fair: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385350204
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00N6PCWYS
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385350204
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Thomas McGuane

title

Crow Fair

dateAdded

2016-12-01T19:22:00Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=1942624
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Crow Fair Stories

crossRefId

1942624

subtitle

Stories

id

1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5

starRating

3.3

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: CrowFair_9780385350204_1942624
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 2541582
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385350204
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 3/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/crow-fair?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: CrowFair_1942624
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00N6PCWYS
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 3/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/crow-fair?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: CrowFair_9780385350204_1942624
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385350204
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 226340
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 3/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/crow-fair?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: family
2. • value: relationships
3. • value: literary fiction
4. • value: romance
5. • value: Humor
6. • value: adult books
7. • value: Writing
8. • value: Fiction
9. • value: crime
10. • value: short story collections
11. • value: novels
12. • value: anthology
13. • value: marriage
14. • value: Coming of age
15. • value: cowboys
16. • value: satire
17. • value: Comedy
18. • value: suspense
19. • value: Short Stories
20. • value: mystery
21. • value: Divorce
22. • value: Modern
23. • value: American west
24. • value: americana
25. • value: Novella
26. • value: Essays
27. • value: Books
28. • value: literature
29. • value: fiction books
30. • value: Literary
31. • value: funny books
32. • value: humor books
33. • value: books for women
34. • value: Best books
35. • value: books for men
36. • value: good books
37. • value: new books
38. • value: top books
39. • value: funny gifts
40. • value: popular books
41. • value: new releases books
42. • value: long story short
43. • value: books fiction
44. • value: top ten books
45. • value: new release books

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: McGuane, Thomas
   • bioText: THOMAS McGUANE lives on a ranch in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of ten novels, including the National Book Award-nominated Ninety-two in the Shade, three works of nonfiction, and four collections of stories. His work has won numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has been anthologized in the Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Sporting Essays.
   • name: Thomas McGuane

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2015-03-03T00:00:00-05:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Crow Fair

fullDescription

Set in Big Sky Country, a triumphant collection of stories written with a comic genius in the vein of Twain and Gogol—from from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, “one of America's best short-story writers of the last 50 years" (The Boston Globe)
These stories attest to the generous compass of Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words. In this collection, filled with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money.
McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him, and Crow Fair is a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Atticus Lish, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Mysterious and illuminating . . . [McGuane] alternately pounds, kneads, works and reworks his material, shedding his tears into it and wrenching away, peeling and scraping it off his hands in a fruitless attempt to escape; then, wretched but indefatigable, going back to knead it again. This obsessive labor seems to change the molecular structure of the substance, from clay to a kind of porcelain . . . [McGuane] has honed a kind of bluff Western comedy of masculinity [and] turns muck into art, which takes wing in flights of ingenuity."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Stefan Beck, The Christian Science Monitor
   • content: "One of McGuane's great gifts is the ability to elicit laughter in dark moments or to jolt the reader of an ostensibly comic tale with a knife twist of pathos or tragedy . . . the only thing [the reader] can expect is to be surprised – by McGuane's deadpan wit, his hyperactive imagination, and his deep appreciation for the human comedy . . . [Crow Fair] serves not merely to make us gape or laugh at man's essential weirdness but also to recognize a bit of it in ourselves."
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 20, 2014
     "Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like,” a woman named Morsel tells Dave, who has just driven Ray across the prairie to visit Morsel and her peculiar father. It’s one of many funny, sad, and awful, awfully human moments from McGuane’s (Gallatin Canyon) latest story collection featuring aging cowboys, middle-aged men resistant to growing up, and the women who plague and perplex them. “Motherlode” traces the road trip to Morsel’s house from a not-so-chance encounter at a smalltown hotel to a scheme for selling drugs in Montana’s northern oil fields. McGuane’s Montana retains wistful and ironic echoes of the Old West. The title story recounts how two brothers handle their dying mother’s revelation of her long-ago love affair at the Crow Fair powwow/Wild West Show. With imagery as sparse and striking as the landscape, houses figure prominently. “Weight Watchers” shows a man who builds homes only for other people. The repossessed “House on Sand Creek” becomes home to a real estate lawyer, his Eastern European wife, her infant son, and Bob the babysitter. At the “Fishing Camp,” two longtime friends find their wilderness guide cannot stand being in the wilderness with men who keep arguing about the past. Among female characters, “Prairie Girl” shines as she makes her way from prostitute to bank president. A boy steals hubcaps; a shaman begs charity; a girl hikes toward the howling of wolves: McGuane’s stories highlight the detachment of young from old, husband from wife, neighbor from neighbor, the dying from life itself.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from January 1, 2015
     Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane's reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country-and, at his best, beyond. These days, McGuane's writing could hardly be further from the showy, overwritten prose of his breakthrough novels like Ninety-two in the Shade (1973). His sense of humor remains, but it's wiser, more fatalistic and more Twain-like; he writes beautifully about the wilderness but always with an eye on its destructive power. As with much of his recent fiction, most of the stories here are set in Montana and turn on relationships going bust. In "Hubcaps," a young boy observes his parents' breakup through the filter of baseball and football games, capturing the protagonist's slowly emerging resentment; in "Lake Story," a man's long-running affair with a married woman collapses during an ill-advised public outing, exposing the thinness of the connections that united them; in "Canyon Ferry," a divorced dad's attempt to prove his intrepidness to his young son during an ice-fishing trip pushes them to the edge of disaster during a storm. One of the best stories in the collection, "River Camp," displays McGuane's skill at pairing emotional turmoil with the untamed outdoors, following two brothers-in-law whose attempt to get away from it all leads them to a tour guide of questionable mental stability, bears rustling through tents and plenty of exposed raw nerves about their marriages. "Stars" tells a similar story in a more interior mode, following an astronomer who increasingly fails to contain her anger at the workaday world-McGuane skillfully depicts the small but constant ways life goes off-plumb for her-and how she fumbles toward balance in the forest. The conflicts throughout this book are age-old-indeed, the title story evokes "Oedipus"-but McGuane's clean writing and psychological acuity enliven them all. A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from November 15, 2014
     If one McGuane story could be called typical, it might be On a Dirt Road, told by a man curious about his new neighbors, the Jewels, a man and wife who studiously avoid contact. Dodging a dinner date with his wife's friends, the man forces himself on the Jewels and finds them charming, naive, and unquestionably odd. He gathers them up to crash his wife's dinner date, only to discover she's used the dinner date to cover for an assignation. Backdoor irony, you might call it, mixed with black humor. In The Good Samaritan the best hired hand who ever lived turns out to be a con artist. In Stars, a young woman tries out every conventional role, until gradually she sheds them all and goes wild. But another young woman shows great business acumen and rises from prostitution to bank president. McGuane can be very funny, as in Grandma and Me, in which the ne'er-do-well grandson shepherds his blind 90-year-old grandmother around a little Montana town, enduring her sometimes just, sometimes inaccurate belittlings for a modest stipend. Grandma is crazy, and so is her grandson, which becomes clear when a dead body passes by in the river, and he abandons Grandma to chase it. It's as if solving the mystery of the corpse would at last explain the universe. McGuane's stories are about the whacked-out order men and womenassign to things, but it's not the true order and merely contributes to a larger confusion that is not far from horror. Seventeen glum, gleeful, brilliant stories from the author of Gallatin Canyon (2006) and Driving on the Rim (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 1, 2014
     

     In his first collection in nine years, when Gallatin Canyon appeared, McGuane takes us back to Big Sky country with 17 stories. Seven are newly minted, while the remainder have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Granta, blue-ribbon publications all. Out there in the wild, McGuane's stories look at what's close: family, as a mother's behavior as she enters dementia unnerves her son; friendship, as two fishing buddies acknowledge that they really don't like each other; and personal failure, as an in-demand cattle inseminator compromises himself by accepting easy money.

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from December 1, 2014
     

     Family ties form the focus of these turbulent stories, set mostly in Montana. The title story concerns the strained relationship of two brothers that's exacerbated by the discovery of their saintly mother's infidelity. "A Long View to the West" explores the highly ambivalent feelings of a son, a small-town car dealer, toward his father as he listens once again to his too-familiar stories when visiting him in the hospital. "River Camp" concerns another strained relationship, this one between lifelong friends who have booked a backwoods expedition in hopes of repairing their friendship only to find themselves in the hands of a mentally unstable guide. In "The Casserole," a seemingly comfortable marriage unexpectedly breaks up on the couple's 25th anniversary as they drive to her parents' house for what is supposed to be a celebratory get-together. VERDICT Very little about the world is ever as solid as it might seem for McGuane's solitary and troubled characters, as the foundations of their lives can give way at a moment's notice, leaving them suddenly bereft--or with only a casserole somehow stuffed into in a lunch pail to carry them through the long ride home. A compelling, emotionally charged collection. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2014
     

     Family ties form the focus of these turbulent stories, set mostly in Montana. The title story concerns the strained relationship of two brothers that's exacerbated by the discovery of their saintly mother's infidelity. "A Long View to the West" explores the highly ambivalent feelings of a son, a small-town car dealer, toward his father as he listens once again to his too-familiar stories when visiting him in the hospital. "River Camp" concerns another strained relationship, this one between lifelong friends who have booked a backwoods expedition in hopes of repairing their friendship only to find themselves in the hands of a mentally unstable guide. In "The Casserole," a seemingly comfortable marriage unexpectedly breaks up on the couple's 25th anniversary as they drive to her parents' house for what is supposed to be a celebratory get-together. VERDICT Very little about the world is ever as solid as it might seem for McGuane's solitary and troubled characters, as the foundations of their lives can give way at a moment's notice, leaving them suddenly bereft--or with only a casserole somehow stuffed into in a lunch pail to carry them through the long ride home. A compelling, emotionally charged collection. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

172

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/1f39c9b7-2489-44d4-96d4-bf47ce5ca3c5/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

1f39c9b7-2489-44d4-96d4-bf47ce5ca3c5

starRating

3.3

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/{1F39C9B7-2489-44D4-96D4-BF47CE5CA3C5}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature
3. • value: Short Stories
4. • value: Humor (Fiction)

publishDateText

03/03/2015

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780385350198

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

Set in Big Sky Country, a triumphant collection of stories written with a comic genius in the vein of Twain and Gogol—from from the acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts, “one of America's best short-story writers of the last 50 years" (The Boston Globe)
These stories attest to the generous compass of Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words. In this collection, filled with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money.
McGuane is as witty and...

sortTitle

Crow Fair Stories

crossRefId

1942624

subtitle

Stories

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC016000
   • description: Fiction / Humorous / General
2. • code: FIC029000
   • description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General