Product Description

In his passionate, luminous novels, David James Duncan has won the devotion of countless critics and readers, earning comparisons to Harper Lee, Tom Robbins, and J.D. Salinger, to name just a few. Now Duncan distills his remarkable powers of observation into this unique collection of short stories and essays.

At the heart of Duncan's tales are characters undergoing the complex and violent process of transformation, with results both painful and wondrous. Equally affecting are his nonfiction reminiscences, the "river teeth" of the title. He likens his memories to the remains of old-growth trees that fall into Northwestern rivers and are sculpted by time and water. These experiences—shaped by his own river of time—are related with the art and grace of a master storyteller. In River Teeth, a uniquely gifted American writer blends two forms, taking us into the rivers of truth and make-believe, and all that lies in between.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #282965 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-01
• Released on: 1996-06-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.10" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .25 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The enormously popular writer of The River Why and The Brothers K offers an eclectic collection of fiction and nonfiction, in which the latter entries pack the greater wallop. There's a whimsical, sentimental and very Zen sensibility at work in the short stories, although Theme and Meaning often strut too blatantly. In one story, a young girl learns the frustrating distinctions between fantasy and reality when her garbage man becomes to her a mythical figure like Santa Claus. In "Not Rocking the Boats," Duncan revisits his river terrain when an ardent and usually drunk fly-fisherman confronts a packaged fishing tour operator. The strongest entries are nonfiction pieces that Duncan calls "river teeth," a term he draws from fallen old-growth trees that are whittled down by rivers to their last and hardest wood. These vignettes are first-person, succinct and uniformly powerful. The best of them, "The Mickey Mantle Koan," considers the irony of a signed ball from Mantle arriving just after the death of his baseball fanatic brother. "A Streetlamp in the Netherlands" depicts a jarring collision between beauty and violence, when a woman on a moped hits an opening car door with her knee. Duncan calls these bits "time-defying knots of experience that remain in us after most of our autobiographies are gone." In these artful musings, Duncan reins in the didactics and presents readers with marvelous nuggets mined from a complex, absurd and magical life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Though some readers dislike blurred lines between genres, Duncan's compilation of fiction and nonfiction is fluid and diverse, if not easily definable. His writings, which are sometimes narrative, mostly defy formal structure and are based on a metaphorical and realistic image he calls river teeth, or the knots in a tree that resist breakdown after the tree has fallen into a river and its main mass has disintegrated. Duncan claims that each person owns scores of river teeth and that they have the potential to guide, wound, and withstand time's erasure. Duncan's style is refreshing because of its intimate tone, the simultaneously lyrical and vernacular prose, vivid description, hilarious action, spirited movement, and poignant observation. "The Garbage Man's Daughter," the key piece, is a perfect re-creation of childhood perception. This emotional and witty portrait of a family's relationships offers an insightful commentary on a current and real threat to children: loss of childhood. Duncan deftly characterizes modern life and American culture--our fears, desires, and drives--revealing in these exquisite vignettes and tales all that shapes a life. Janet St. John

Review
"Exquisite." —Buzz

"Poignant, funny, and artful, Duncan's Oriver teeth' are like elongated American haiku, stretching their grainy syllables from the home plate of nostalgia to the outfield fences of eternity." —Tom Robbins

"To read River Teeth is to have a stranger's recollections loom up out of vagary and namelessness, and to grip you as if they were your own." —Los Angeles Times

"David James Duncan is in love with water, the rivers and streams that coursed through his life. Believe me, you will be swept up by his rivers, carried downstream, and deposited in a new place. In that new place, Duncan will build a fire and tell you a bunch of stories. What else could you want?" —Sherman Alexie