Long Odds: Stories

By Gordon Weaver

In Long Odds, Gordon Weaver's latest collection, each male protagonist struggles for moral and emotional strength to cope with a universe gone awry. Each of the eleven stories centers around a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826212913
• ISBN13: 9780826212917
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: University of Missouri Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Long Odds shows a Master at Work

In LONG ODDS, Gordon Weaver's characters desperately grasp at simple and sometimes absurd ceremonies to find hope in their lives. Kleczka in the title story routinely goes to a once-a-month gambling and drinking party with his high school buddies. While he notes the erosions of their lives and delights in his winnings, he counts his blessings-a house in the suburbs, the second best looking girl from high school as a wife, two good kids, and a good job at a Saturn dealership. But with a mean, cruel remark from one of his buddies, he psychologically unravels his life. In the "The Divorced Men's Mall Walkers Club," Leichtfuss arrives at 6 in the morning to join his clique, the divorced men, for their walk. The social pecking order breaks into groups, and Leichtfuss sees the triteness in the mall and the walkers, but etches just a bit of dignity and hope from it. And Q in "Q: Questing," Q finds relief from his dismal academic slave life in cruising the freeways. Weaver takes the quotidian of our world and lets his characters glimpse the hopelessness in their lives and in our culture. But deep down they have a hard won dignity that keeps us rooting for them because in a way they are us. And as the names of the characters indicate, we get a picture of the old ethnic neighborhoods giving way to corporate middle American. But this collection is not just more dismal modern angst. In his own unique way, Weaver exaggerates the desires of the characters and their worlds are exaggerated just enough so that we can't help but laugh at them and us. Weaver's stories should be far more popular because of their humor and pathos, and aficionados of fiction should take a look at the stories to look at how a master subtly manipulates the tools of the trade: point of view, verb tense, phrasing, colloquialisms, flashbacks, and flashforwards.