Tara Ison. (2015). Ball: Stories. Catapult.

Tara Ison. 2015. Ball: Stories. Catapult.

Tara Ison, Ball: Stories. Catapult, 2015.

Tara Ison. Ball: Stories. Catapult, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

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31. • value: Music
32. • value: Chick Lit
33. • value: fiction books
34. • value: Literary
35. • value: realistic fiction
36. • value: gaslight
37. • value: gaslighting
38. • value: gifts for women
39. • value: book club books
40. • value: relationship books
41. • value: gifts for her
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Ison, Tara
   • bioText: Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List, A Child Out of Alcatraz, a Finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway, selected as a "2013 Best Books of Summer" by O Magazine. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies. She is the co-author of the cult film "Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead."
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imprint

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2015-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Ball

fullDescription

Ball is the thrilling and emotionally provocative debut collection of short fiction by the acclaimed author of the novels Rockaway and A Child Out of Alcatraz and the essay collection Reeling through Life.
Ball explores the darker edges of love and sex and death, how they are intimately and often violently connected, with bright, vivid stories set mostly in contemporary Los Angeles. In “Cactus,” a young girl comes to fear the outside world following the freakish, accidental death of her adventure-seeking, naturalist boyfriend in the California desert; in “Wig,” a woman must help her best friend face life-threatening cancer while covering up an unseemly affair with her friend’s husband; in “Fish,” the narrator sits watch over a dying uncle, trying to pay for past sins while administering to his final needs, but distracted by the ravenous fish in the Koi pond near the hospital; and in the collection’s stunning title story, the bonds of friendship and pet ownership collide in the most startling and unexpected ways.
With a keen insight into the edges of human behavior and an assured literary hand, Ball is the new book by one of the West’s most provocative stylists.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: O Magazine
   • content: "The women of these short stories sleep with a dying friend's husband, dump a boyfriend for a dog, and feed a sinful uncle to koi in a collection that explores the underbelly of sex, American-style."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Slant
   • content: "Ison's stories blur the boundaries between the imagistic, the realistic, the symbolic, and the psychological."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Hello Giggles
   • content: "Twisted, dark, and wild ... [Ison] is a talented writer who may have slipped under your radar. Be prepared to become obsessed."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Marie Claire
   • content: "Each tale in Ison's story collection, seemingly innocuous, delves into a dark examination of inappropriate behavior: affairs, self-mutilation, shocking deaths; no faux pas stone is left unturned. But with her expert writing and willingness to push boundaries the grotesqueness and horrors are bearable, even beautiful."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
   • content: "[a] captivating and disturbing collection of stories: think Mary Gaitskill or Miranda July, but more demented....Ison's (Rockaway) straightforward style belies a deeper, parallel truth hidden in each story. These stories find a strange sweet spot between the mundane and the horrific. They may shock but they also provoke, with many leading to an unexpected, and not always happy, ending."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "Elegant, creepy short stories with a horror-film sensibility....That classic horror-movie elision, from friendly normalcy to nauseating terror, is made by most of these beautifully written, often first-person narratives....Freaky, nasty, highly original, and unforgettable, whether you like it or not."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star
   • content: “Tara Ison's stories locate the pleasure in pain, the victory in betrayal, the beauty in depravity--they walk the line between love and debasement. In the end, Ison's characters are knots of selfish interest and desire, clinging to any warm body as death grows near, achingly human in her portrayal."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
   • content: "The stories in Ball take place at the far limits of obsession and desire and lust, exploring the dangers of turning toward the kinds of love we have tried always to refuse. Tara Ison is a fearless writer, and her bravery before the dark urges of the heart thrills on every page."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal
   • content: “Tara Ison is the mistress of bad behavior. She divines the beauty in darkness. She twists the familiar--a friendship, an apology--till something fantastic cracks. And she will have you in thrall to her gorgeous language. The stories in Ball are exquisite and harrowing. Must read straight through. Must remember to breathe."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Shelf Awareness
    • content: "Is that a soundtrack I hear? My reading life this winter has somehow become a ticket to a film-ish book festival. I'm not talking book-to-film adaptations, but works in which movies and Hollywood play a prominent role.
      The realization hit me while reading Patton Oswalt's wonderful Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film, and was confirmed by Tara Ison's Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies. "Movies have gotten under my skin, formed my perceptions, influenced the choices I've made," Ison writes. "I've learned how to live at the movies, from the movies; I am who I am because of movies, and, to some degree, all the other movie freaks out there are, too." As am I."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Booklist
    • content: "Ison is keenly aware of how cinema's massive power molds us, teaches how to love, to drink, and to die....Confessional, honest, and humorous, Reeling through Life is an engrossing memoir and a guide to essential film..."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly
    • content: "Novelist and screenwriter Ison (A Child out of Alcatraz, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead) delivers an innovative blend of film criticism and literary memoir in this absorbing collection of 10 essays....The result is powerfully universal, and the author's writing is at once intellectually razor-sharp and poetic as...
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 7, 2015
      The synthetic blond, the berserk lover, the horny teenager—Ison delves into the minds of these characters and others in this captivating and disturbing collection of stories: think Mary Gaitskill or Miranda July, but more demented. Ison writes about sex as the undercurrent of all adult life. Past abuse, current relationships, future encounters—none dispel the magnetic tug of human sexual attraction. The erratic narrator of the title story is just as annoyed by her dog’s obsession with playing ball as her boyfriend Eric is annoyed by her obsession with the dog. Eric breaks up with her, but she can’t break up with the dog. Or can she? In “Fish,” the main character waits for her dreaded uncle to die so that she can quietly feed his remains to the fish at a botanical gardens. Another story dramatizes the wig shopping one friend must do for her friend dying of cancer. The resentment between the friend builds to a startling climax with a pair of tweezers. Ison’s (Rockaway) straightforward style belies a deeper, parallel truth hidden in each story. These stories find a strange sweet spot between the mundane and the horrific. They may shock but they also provoke, with many leading to an unexpected, and not always happy, ending.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2015
      Elegant, creepy short stories with a horror-film sensibility. If you look at the table of contents of Ison's (Rockaway, 2013, etc.) short story collection before you read the book, you will see a column of innocent-looking nouns. Cactus. Ball. Wig. Fish. Apology. After you finish, the same list shimmers with evil portent. That classic horror-movie elision, from friendly normalcy to nauseating terror, is made by most of these beautifully written, often first-person narratives. The title story is named for a game of fetch played with an ugly little dog the narrator halfheartedly adopts but then falls for utterly. "I loved her so much it was numbing, and sometimes, to jab a feeling at myself, I fantasized about her dying." The relentless, autonomic neediness that drives the dog to insist on playing ball is mirrored in a sexual affair the narrator is conducting with her best friend's neighbor, who is a "wonderfully alpine six-feet-four" and is "brusque and unsheepish, as fearless of sex as a porn star." This attitude toward sex characterizes the narrative voice itself as it describes the man's penis and the dog's vagina with equal precision. The tale ends with a horrible betrayal and the surreal violence of a campfire ghost story. Betrayal is a central theme in many other stories as well. In "Wig," the narrator lovingly cares for her best friend who's dying of cancer while carrying on an affair with her husband. In "Apology," a wife resorts to gothic self-mutilation to win back her husband after he walks in on her with another man in their bed. Sexual degradation and abuse is everywhere: in an after-school job at a bakery, in the hospital where an old uncle is dying, on the website of an Internet dominatrix. And bizarre, extravagant death-by cactus, by knitting, by famous boyfriend-is never far away. Freaky, nasty, highly original, and unforgettable, whether you like it or not.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

24

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Ball is the thrilling and emotionally provocative debut collection of short fiction by the acclaimed author of the novels Rockaway and A Child Out of Alcatraz and the essay collection Reeling through Life.
Ball explores the darker edges of love and sex and death, how they are intimately and often violently connected, with bright, vivid stories set mostly in contemporary Los Angeles. In “Cactus,” a young girl comes to fear the outside world following the freakish, accidental death of her adventure-seeking, naturalist boyfriend in the California desert; in “Wig,” a woman must help her best friend face life-threatening cancer while covering up an unseemly affair with her friend’s husband; in “Fish,” the narrator sits watch over a dying uncle, trying to pay for past sins while administering to his final needs, but distracted by the ravenous fish in the Koi pond near the hospital; and in the collection’s...

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