Joan Wickersham. (2012). The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Joan Wickersham. 2012. The News From Spain: Seven Variations On a Love Story. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Joan Wickersham, The News From Spain: Seven Variations On a Love Story. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

Joan Wickersham. The News From Spain: Seven Variations On a Love Story. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.

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32. • value: short story anthology
33. • value: valentines day gifts for her
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Wickersham, Joan
   • bioText: JOAN WICKERSHAM was born in New York City. She is the author of two previous books, most recently The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe; she has published essays and reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune; and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.
   • name: Joan Wickersham

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2012-10-09T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The News from Spain

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The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. • “Like Alice Munro at her best.” —Julia Glass, author of Three Junes

Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Robert Silman, The Boston Globe
   • content:

     "Captivating...This wise and courageous and often brilliant collection of stories, written in clean, precise prose, is not only a pleasure to read, but also breaks new ground in our perceptions of what a short story can be... wonderfully imaginative and original."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: "When love begins to writhe and ferment, spread its inescapable fingers, when it does its hard work of forming real behavior, these are the realms Wickersham inhabits, finding the unlit fissures, the whispers of solace and grieving, betrayal and delusion, quotidian and ecstatic in language of infinite elegance....[But] do not mistake Wickersham's exquisitely polished prose for good manners. Although [she] writes with an almost grave formality, a vintage grace (I mean that as a compliment), she is brutal and funny too, so that the stories' tension is heightened by one's awareness that the author is always on the verge of a startling observation. Her roiling moods and tender characters, her trenchant truths, her careful and divine prose...[make] you wonder at the exquisite, tremulous tension in everything, the insatiable hungers for all kinds of connection, especially the connection to oneself.."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Leigh Newman, Oprah.com, Best of the Week
   • content: "Virtuosic...but the more compelling triumph is Wickersham's emotional cannonball into every single one of her characters. The doubts and tenderness they share are ones that only the finest fiction can create, because you, the reader, feel as much or more than anyone on the page, be it the private, searing heartache or the over-the-top, sloppy happiness that so often happens in real-life love."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Catherine Straut, Elle
   • content: "Joan Wickersham makes a triumphant return to fiction with The News From Spain. This collection of tales draws forth a fascinating cast of characters...These stories are bound together by the universal search for companionship and understanding...Wickersham articulates subtleties of human behavior that ordinarily elude language altogether; she unveils her characters' unacknowledged thoughts and emotions in a terse style that defies cliché in its commitment to realism. Wickersham paints everyday yet complex portraits of love, filigreed with truths that resonate."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling...Wickersham dissects the human heart with precision and restraint that make her work all the more moving. Short stories don't get much better than this."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com
   • content: "The News From Spain evokes hidden topographies of need, and the emotional tipping points that occasionally break through to the surface."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Widower's Tale
   • content: "Joan Wickersham has done it again: astonished, enchanted, and moved me, this time in an unorthodox yet classically insightful collection of stories. While each one takes the reader to a world distinctly and alluringly its own, all seven tales come together at the end in a shimmering constellation. Like Alice Munro at her best, Wickersham sees almost too well how the choices we make in our many relationships--with parents, spouses, lovers, teachers, friends; even a chance acquaintance--steer our lives in unpredictable, sometimes shocking ways."
8. • premium: False
   • source: André Gregory, co-author of My Dinner with André
   • content: "Joan Wickersham's The News from Spain is a kaleidoscopic view of the subject of love. It is amazingly perceptive psychologically, a gorgeous, completely original work. I loved it. As soon as I finished it, I began to read it again."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed and To My Dearest Friends
   • content: "Joan Wickersham's well-mannered characters control their responses to disappointment with outward finesse, which makes their heartbreak all the more potent. An expert in the he-and-she of it, Wickersham turns the most exquisitely particular truths into universals. The News from Spain is brilliant."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Suzanne Berne, author of A Crime in the Neighborhood,
    • content: "Desire is literature's great subject, and yet so rarely can a writer come close to describing the real thing. In The News from Spain, Joan Wickersham has achieved something miraculous: seven prismatic stories that refract the lonely, marvelous, terrible complexity of human longing...Radiant with insight."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 20, 2012
      Subtitled, "Seven Variations on a Love Story," each of the seven stories in this uneven collection is titled "The News from Spain" and makes ingenious use of that phrase somewhere in the narrative. A mother consigned to a nursing home and her adult daughter engage in an intricate dance of filial obligation after the mother's condition improves. At an all-boys school, a lone female student, 13, develops a friendship with her married Spanish teacher whose secret extracurricular activities will in time bring tragedy to the school. While being interviewed for a biography, the elderly widow of a long-dead race car driver is shocked by a confession from the biographer's wife. A married woman, for the amusement of a co-worker with whom she's in love, invents a story about a WWII-era doctor's relationship with two women. Although the stories are written with intelligence and acutely observed, some have overcomplicated framing devices, and there's not much variation throughout, making the concept feel more like a gimmick than a conceit that illuminates the characters' attempts to connect in a world of hidden desires. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman.

12. • premium: True
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    • content:

      September 15, 2012
      Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling fiction from novelist/memoirist Wickersham (The Suicide Index, 2008, etc.). The seven pieces here tell seven different stories, though each has the same title. "The News from Spain" is also a touchstone phrase in each, its meaning transformed by the characters' experiences. In the first tale, a woman whose longtime marriage has been rocked by a single infidelity sits on the beach with her friend, a man marrying for companionship and hoping his bride-to-be doesn't want sex; they listen to "the news from Spain" roaring in a seashell, a recollection of simpler times. The phrase encapsulates a daughter's discovery of her profound love for her dying mother; the excitement a teacher brings into a student's life; betrayal, tragedy and the eternal sameness amid varieties of love. Four pieces are pure fiction, but Wickersham is particularly interesting when she rings changes on history. A very long tale insightfully examines the real-life marriage of choreographer George Balanchine and ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, stricken by polio and forced to accept her husband's unfaithfulness; but it is just as nuanced and shrewd about Le Clercq's relationship with her gay caregiver. The collection's best story imagines modern odysseys for the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro and Elvira from Don Giovanni, interpolating the memoirs of their creator, librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte; what could have been a gimmick is instead a beautiful meditation on art, love and friendship. The final piece is slightly bumpier as it interweaves memories of a platonic adultery that may or may not be fictional with the story of a New York doctor beloved by both a president's widow and a female journalist (unnamed, as were Balanchine and Le Clercq, but clearly Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha Gellhorn, and David Gurewitsch). Yet, here too Wickersham dissects the human heart with precision and restraint that make her work all the more moving. Short stories don't get much better than this, and for once, the overarching framework strengthens rather than dissipates their effectiveness.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2012
      

      Astute readers will know Wickersham as the author of National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index and will have seen her short fiction in Best American Short Stories. This theme-and-variation collection swirls across the globe and over centuries. The book on this list I'm most curious to see; with a reading group guide.

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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

      October 1, 2012
      The impish recurrence of a phrase, the news from Spain, links these seven stories, appearing in them in widely varying ways. It is a reminder of their deeper cohesion. Though they jump from eighteenth-century Prague to New York in the 1940s and feature a race-car driver, a teenaged girl, and a middle-aged bride, they make a similar point: love is flawed, uneven, and impossible to pin down. There is love in all forms herea child for a parent, a wife for a cheating husband or a lover, an aide for his chargebut it never runs smoothly. Wickersham asserts, through a character, that love stories are dreams and invention . . . guesswork. By presenting the blind enthusiasm of a crush and later its disillusionment, the sad realization of loving more or less than a partner, and the distorting pull of differing needs and obligations in a relationship, she demonstrates how biased and baseless narratives of love can be. Characters tell themselves stories of passion or betrayal, and readers see the reality of their frail, imperfect emotional faculties.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 15, 2012
      

      Intriguingly, this collection and the seven stories within it all share the same title, but locale is not what links them--in one story, set in a boarding school, the phrase is merely a Spanish teacher's tagline. Rather, the stories all are poignant and insightful, dealing with age, infirmity, and loss, or with love occurring late in life. The protagonists are mature women of independent means, who've led cultured, interesting lives, or they are younger persons whom we see from the vantage point of later life. Wickersham is as skilled as Alice Munro in maneuvering her characters, and the reader, through time. Characters and situations are revealed almost offhandedly, through conversation or minor revelation, or perhaps not at all. In one of the collection's best, we never learn exactly why a former star ballerina is now confined to a wheelchair, but we see intimately how immobility circumscribes her life. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of modern short fiction.--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.

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