Product Description

In this breathtaking and unforgettable collection of fourteen stories, Molly Giles introduces us to women struggling in the everyday, and in elegant, poignant, and achingly true prose, observes the human condition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1933232 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-08
• Released on: 1998-10-08
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .37" h x 5.58" w x 8.60" l, .44 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Amazon.com
All of the stories in Molly Giles's second collection of short stories, Creek Walk are united by a common theme: the struggle of women to become visible in a world of men. In "The Writers' Model," the narrator sits in a room full of male writers revealing the most intimate details of her life in hopes that the men will one day translate them into fully rounded women on the page; in the end, of course, they don't. In "War" the main character is so alienated from her ex-husband that she does not even name him, referring to him only as "he." In the collection's most harrowing story, "Talking to Strangers," the narrator is literally invisible: brutally murdered and mutilated by a young man on a mountaintop, she speaks from the grave.

Molly Giles is a skillful writer and the women in Creek Walk leap off the page fully dimensional, their faults and virtues observed and interpreted. The men, however, are mostly ciphers: at best, unconsciously oblivious to the women in their lives, at worst willfully misunderstanding them. Still, Ms. Giles's elegant prose and memorable women make this collection a worthwhile read.

From Publishers Weekly
Like Grace Paley, Giles writes exquisitely voice-driven stories that bring arch humor to the social and interior lives of her characters, who are mostly women. In her second collection of stories (her first, Rough Translations, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer), Giles captures the exasperation of women-especially their frustration over not being fully known by others and, sometimes, even themselves. The short, hilarious "The Writers' Model" serves not only as a funny indictment of male obtuseness but also as an aesthetic statement about literature's ultimate inability to capture the fullness of character. The female narrator serves as an artist's model for a group of male writers who, pursuing the grail of realism, ask her questions. "The men were lonely and ignorant, but they were educable, I thought, and I took pride in helping them, however slightly, understand others." But she soon learns better: "The writers' questions began to tire me-that same one, week after week, about the underpants-and I decided to quit before I became what they saw." Giles distills all the irony of real life into remarkably clean and fluid prose. But unlike the plodding scribes of "The Writers' Model," she fully understands that her portraits, for all their clarity and definition, are not definitive. It's that comprehension of limits that, paradoxically, frees Giles to write aggressively. Because she knows she can't pin truths about character or society down permanently, she's not afraid to pin them down long enough for us to get a good, revealing look.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Giles' Rough Translations (1984) was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and won the Boston Globe Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction. As these 14 stories attest, she continues to produce first-rate fiction, running the gamut from almost kitchen-sink mundanity in "War," in which a woman returns home from a Nicaraguan conference to the trash her ex left behind while minding their child, to the surreal in "Writers' Model," in which a young woman is interviewed by tweedy men with Irish setters at their feet, who ask about her body (she readily disrobes), orgasms, and nymphomania--some even watch her on the toilet. Elsewhere, Giles subjects bad, bland, and boring marriages to cauterizing scrutiny, particularly in "Smoke and Mirrors," as a sensitive, vibrant woman, fascinated by an oddly creepy, strangely compelling man with braces, slowly falls out of love with her husband. Giles achieves her impact, not with literary smoke and mirrors, but by raising the ordinary, through her craft, to extraordinary levels. Whitney Scott