Valerie Martin. (2015). Sea Lovers: Selected Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Valerie Martin. 2015. Sea Lovers: Selected Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Valerie Martin, Sea Lovers: Selected Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Valerie Martin. Sea Lovers: Selected Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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Sea Lovers

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Martin, Valerie
   • bioText: VALERIE MARTIN is the author of eleven novels, four collections of short fiction, and a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain's Orange Prize (for Property).
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2015-08-18T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Sea Lovers

fullDescription

Twelve extraordinary short stories from the award-winning, bestselling author of Property that explore human morality and our shared losses and joys, shifting from realism to myth, from the Louisiana bayou to the streets of Rome and beyond. • “Complex and wonderful.... A long, cool drink of water.” —The New York Times Book Review

In these stories, Martin mines her three literary preoccupations—animals, artists, and metamorphoses—to unforgettable effect. In “The Consolation of Nature,” a family battles a giant rat that has invaded their home. “The Open Door” follows an American poet in Rome, forced to choose between her lover and a world so new it takes her breath away. In “Et in Academic Ego,” a seventeen-year-old bayou orphan falls in love with a centaur who transforms her life. And the title story conjures up a hideous mermaid who fatally seduces a fisherman. Sophisticated, incisive, deeply felt and always surprising, Sea Lovers showcases the enduring work of an indispensable writer.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Martin's prose is lucid, and she avoids stylistic pyrotechnics. Her primary aim is to allow her characters their contradictory feelings, giving them room to breathe ... Martin's complex and wonderful stories, with their careful rendering and sober insights, offer their own kind of relief for the reader: This book is a long, cool drink of water."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: "Valerie Martin is a consummate stylist. A cool, spare writer who can make the fantastic utterly, often horribly believable ... In her latest collection of 12 short stories that gift is on full display. A mermaid washes ashore, with murderous intent. A magical suitor displays bad behavior, as do all sorts of more realistic lovers and spouses, artists and writers. Most often, the stories resolve with a twist--some tragic, some simply odd--that causes them to linger in the reader's mind: cautionary tales about the mysteries of life."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews, starred review
   • content: "Whether they're self-absorbed painters, deserted women, or even centaurs, Martin's characters are torn between the facades they don and the baser, more animalistic impulses--the needs for power, attention, and revenge--that animate them ... an insightful look into the evolution of Martin's writing and her talent for depicting our darker natures. Varied, engaging, and often shocking."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "This collection is rife with the unspoken cracks between people, and leaves a haunting, lingering impression."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 20, 2015
     Martin (The Ghost of Mary Celeste) assembles the stories in this collection from declarative, unfurnished sentences that have the stocky feel of a translated text. It's a style that lends itself well to the spare, domestic situations—a cat stuck in a salmon can, dinner party insults, relationship jealousy—that she fixates on and then abruptly breaks from, ending stories in an open parabola. Martin even takes matters a step further, embellishing her quotidian situations with gothic detail. This title story, which is about mermaids, sits directly next to a story of marital unrest, in which a husband and wife idly discuss a gym membership; other stories combine the grotesque with the domestic, as in "The Consolation of Nature," a story about a family that becomes obsessed with killing a rat. Martin's characters, always self-aware but rarely empowered, begin and end most stories either feeling inferior or unsatisfied in a relationship, with sex acting merely as a dulling agent of mollification. Dramatic resolution isn't the point of this collection, to devastating effect—quite literally in "The Unfinished Novel," perhaps the most affecting story, in which a man comes into contact with his ex-girlfriend and her unfinished manuscript of 20 years. This collection is rife with the unspoken cracks between people, and leaves a haunting, lingering impression.

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

     Starred review from June 15, 2015
     A career-spanning collection of short stories that illustrates the writer's preoccupation with animals, artists, and the fantastical. The stories in this volume-split into sections called "Among the Animals," "Among the Artists," and "Metamorphoses"-were gathered from more than 30 years of Martin's published work (The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, 2014, etc.). But one recurring question, which Martin voices in her introduction, is strung through them all: "Are we animals, or are we something else?" Whether they're self-absorbed painters, deserted women, or even centaurs, Martin's characters are torn between the facades they don and the baser, more animalistic impulses-the needs for power, attention, and revenge-that animate them. In "Spats," Lydia, who's recently been abandoned by her husband, contemplates exacting revenge on his beloved dogs, which are still in her care. "The Freeze" finds a middle-aged teacher spurned by a young love interest at a party; in a resulting state of self-pity, she ignores an ominous noise outside her house during a thunderstorm. "Among the Artists" offers "The Unfinished Novel," the collection's standout. Maxwell, a moderately successful novelist, is visiting his hometown of New Orleans when he encounters Rita Richard, a former lover from his graduate writing program who broke his heart long ago. Once golden-haired and blessed with a prose style that "made us all sick with envy," Rita is now frumpy and still unpublished, so Maxwell assures himself of his superiority; but when, after her death, he finds himself in possession of her writing, he must decide between his curiosity and contempt. Here, the characters are sketched with such complexity that the reader's sympathies are torn for the whole story. While the final section showcases Martin's imagination-a brutal mermaid watches humans drown in the eponymous "Sea Lovers"; a centaur falls in love with the opera in "Et In Arcadiana Ego"-Martin doesn't enter those characters' minds quite as deeply as in her other stories, making them less emotionally appealing. But overall, this is an insightful look into the evolution of Martin's writing and her talent for depicting our darker natures. Varied, engaging, and often shocking.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

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Twelve extraordinary short stories from the award-winning, bestselling author of Property that explore human morality and our shared losses and joys, shifting from realism to myth, from the Louisiana bayou to the streets of Rome and beyond. • “Complex and wonderful.... A long, cool drink of water.” —The New York Times Book Review

In these stories, Martin mines her three literary preoccupations—animals, artists, and metamorphoses—to unforgettable effect. In “The Consolation of Nature,” a family battles a giant rat that has invaded their home. “The Open Door” follows an American poet in Rome, forced to choose between her lover and a world so new it takes her breath away. In “Et in Academic Ego,” a seventeen-year-old bayou orphan falls in love with a centaur who transforms her life. And the title story conjures up a hideous mermaid who fatally seduces a fisherman. Sophisticated,...

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