Sparkman in the Sky & Other Stories

By Brian Griffin

Book Overview

"Brian Griffin's first work of fiction, Sparkman in the Sky, is like Hemingway's In Our Time in that it can be read either as a collection of short stories or as a discontinuous novel. From story to story, themes gather meaning until in the last one they are resolved or transposed into a new key. The first-person narrator may be named Hal or Ian or Victor, but by the end all these narrators have fused into a collective exemplar of how things go in a certain place in our time. . . . It's no knock on Brian Griffin to say that he has learned from Hemingway, among others. After all, Miles Davis was no less gifted a musician, no less original, for having learned from Dizzy Gillespie. And Griffin has his own original qualities, his own subtleties, his own sly humor-even a gift for farce. . . . This book is way beyond promising."-The New York Times Book Review

Brian Griffin grew up in the country near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, in a family he describes as "infested by preachers, all Southern Baptists of the fundamentalist sort." He earned his B.A. in English from Middle Tennessee State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Griffin teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He lives with his wife and children in Knoxville and works closely with a group there to promote interracial harmony in the inner city. Griffin's stories and poems have been well published in journals including Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Clockwatch Review, Snake Nation Review, and Southern Poetry Review. In addition to various short stories and poems, Griffin is currently at work on a novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188933006X
• ISBN13: 9781889330068
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

more enjoyable than a stump full of grandaddies!

I really enjoyed this author's stories which hang together much like chapters in a novel. Sometimes, points in one story are revisited by familiar characters and resolved in a later story. The characters and dialogue are drawn very true to Tennessee life--especially covite Soddy life, presenting a natural humor, not condescending in the least. My very favorite story is Sparkman in the Sky itself. But then there's The Courtship of Dixie Pepper...and Training to be an Astronaut...and.. While I value the southerness of Mr. Griffin's "place", I appreciate even more how Bucktooth Haven could be in rural Nebraska or North Dakota, Pennsylvania or Vermont.

Sparkman in the Sky

The stories are engaging and funny, fantastic but real. I'm not a southerner, but the book made a certain part of the south come alive for me in an original and convincing and entertaining way.

Sparkman and the Sky

I grew up in Tennessee. I come from a long line of people who have lived and died in the South. It is very difficult to capture the spirit, flavor, thoughts and expressons of people. I read Brian Griffin's book and found myself laughing and nearly crying (we Southern men reserve crying for only a dozen or so times in our lives, but I was close). Griffin captured the Southern spirit of the people with grace, wit, charm. If you like Southern stories, Southern people, Southern lives of times past, read this book when you have time to sit, reflect and be part of the spirit. A very, very fine read