The Origin of Stars and Other Stories

by Katharine Haake

Book Overview

Fiction. These stories, powerful eco-fables of down-home Americana, take place during the relentless rollover from one millennium to the next in a world remarkably like our own--and not. In one, for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0982354223
• ISBN13: 9780982354223
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: What Books Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

"These things happen all the time." In a way, yes. In another, definitely not.

Each of the eight tall tales in Katherine Haake's The Origin of Stars and Other Stories feature disappearances of one kind or another. For example: -- A mother loses her sons, and although Haake notes, "It is this way with mothers and their sons forever and in all times," it most certainly isn't in the sense that this is more a modern pied piper twisted fairy tale than a conventional story of sons growing up and leaving the nest in the "normal" way. -- A wife and mother leaves her family for an excursion of self-discovery, her parting note to her husband and sons only two sentences: "Think of me when you tie your shoes. You were all such wonderful boys." As far as her frantic family is concerned, she has fallen off the face of the earth. Actually, she finds herself, after a few adventures with "gurus" of worldly experience, in a corn field. where she dreams about the others described in this collection (the opening quotation is taken from her story), and where she has to decide whether she wants her old life back. -- A father and son each disappear from the life of the other: "Of course the only thing we know for certain is there was a river and there was a boy. The boy grew up, and when he was a man, he had a son. After a while, the man disappeared, and then the son did. These things happen all the time." Again, they happen, but not in the phantasmagoric, shifting manner that prevails here" "And will your father, in the land that is absent of both trees and water -- everything, besides you, that he ever loved -- receive you with his open arms? Will he give you back your memory, and turn things around the right way again?" -- In "The Origin of Stars" an astronomer named Hubert disappears from the public eye. But disappearance on a far grander scale comes later and causes him to decide "he had gone about everything wrong, and though he wanted more than anything to go back and do it over, it was too late and Hubert knew it." This story melds momentous cosmic change with the regrets of a man at the end of life. Is it really the end of so much more than Hubert? Or is Hubert seeing his own life's end as the end of everything because he, a mortal, cannot see beyond himself? If these and the other four stories were paintings, they could be brushed into existence by the likes of a Salvador Dali mind. Haake's hypnagogic style intensifies her explorations of human frailty in synthesis with nature's unconcerned march and the unpredictability of minds' tricks. These are stories of dreamed millennial change, uncertainties, and anticipations. These are stories fusing the complexities of families into circular or spiraling confusions. These are stories of basic desires and their torments and rewards. These are stories that lead us down the subconscious path; that challenge us to free ourselves of rational expectations and allow ourselves to follow Haake down the rabbit hole where uncompromising shocks, philosophical murmurings, and sharp,

Starfull

I've been a fan of Kate Haake's for a long time. These are gorgeous stories, in fact fabulous, and beautifully written. Haake is the queen of the qualified sentence; her prose weaves and dances and sucks you into its universe.

This book should be in your personal library

This is a wonderful, amazing collection of short stories. As I read these pieces, I felt alive as a reader, engaged in the business of life. Kate Haake uses language beautifully and knows how to craft a story. Within the story, her authorial turns, asides, pointed comments, and questions make us think, too, and look anew at our own assumptions. She writes particularly well of the arc of a person's life, the relationships of friends, lovers, parents and children over the course of time, what can happen when we don't pay attention and what can happen even when we do. Within her compassion for her characters, and her deep understanding of their inner lives, she also allows for a fabulism--a mythic and magical point of view that suddenly takes the story into another realm. This is the kind of literature we want to read and support!

Orbits that surprise and ultimately warm

We are introduced to characters whose layers move us to look from new and, at first glance, cool surfaces to a compelling humanity just a little further on. The beauty of words propels this journey as the mothers and children and boys of all ages move between zones of time and place and respond internally in ways that are a bit beyond the imagined. There is nothing easy about the stories and while we puzzle with them, the author's enormous affection for her characters infects and warms.

Exquisite Gems

Each of these stories is a delight. Magical, fantastical, yet each remains firmly grounded in realworld present-day concerns -- from the domestic to the global, from anxieties of mothers and new lovers to fears for the ailing planet. They proceed with unfailing clarity, luxuriating in their own syntax, in the joyous world of words, constantly flinging doors open to fresh surprises. Beautiful, hilarious, deliciously startling and deeply satisfying.