Anne Panning - Böcker

In settings as different as Honolulu, Hawaii, small-town Minnesota, and Taxco, Mexico, these nine stories and a novella show blue-collar characters struggling to achieve the American Dream—and sometimes alienating friends and family as they try to upgrade their working-class pedigree. Anne Panning’s people, despite their mixed record of success, make us root for them on their sometimes heartbreaking journeys of entrepreneurship, love, and loss.In “Tidal Wave Wedding” a tsunami in Honolulu yields surprising results for a couple on their honeymoon. In “All-U-Can-Eat,” a woman tries to stave off the investment of her inheritance into a restaurant specializing in frog legs. In the novella, “Freeze,” a teenage son’s future is forever complicated after a “life altering” accident confines his father to a wheelchair and accelerates the disintegration of his parents’ marriage. An eerie clinical replay of another accident—this one on a bicycle in Hawaii—is at the center of “What Happened,” and in the title story a college theater major gets caught up in his father’s exotic pets scheme.Panning’s stories show an acute awareness of place, and—whether it be a seventeenth-century former-monastery in Mexico, a suburban housing development in Minnesota, or a hard-luck laundromat on the Oregon coast—each setting often tells us something about the characters who occupy them. Sometimes sad and often funny, Super America takes risks with our notions about the American Dream through characters caught between their working-class roots and grandiose visions.

Anne Panning's fiction has been described as warm and original by Publishers Weekly, intelligent and humorous by the Boston Globe, graceful and wry by Booklist, and infectious and enchanting by the New York Times. In fact, Panning's last collection of short stories, Super America, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceEnter this exciting new novel, the best work yet from a writer whose astute observations of American life are as honest as they are engaging. Butter is a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of small-town Minnesota during the 1970s and told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old girl, Iris, who learns from her parents that she is adopted. The story of Iris's childhood is at first beguiling and innocent: hers is a world filled with bell-bottoms and Barbie dolls, Shrinky Dinks and Shaun Cassidy records, TV dinners and trips to grandma's. But as her parents' marriage starts to unravel, Iris grows more and more observant of disintegration all around her, and the simple cadences of her story quickly attain an unnerving tension as she wavers precariously between girlhood and adolescence. In the end, Iris's story represents a profound meditation on growing up estranged in small town America-on being an outsider in a world increasingly averse to them.Passionate, lyrical, and disquieting, this intensely moving novel is a rich exploration of a crucial theme in American literature that will confirm Anne Panning's place as a major figure in the world of contemporary fiction.

Short stories depicting individuals trying to live with and without their dysfunctional families, clinging to whatever stability they can find. "Panning's style is experimental--changing points of view within a single story . . . The voices of Panning's characters are invariably riveting."--Newsday