The Loom and Other Stories (Graywolf Short Fiction Series)

By Ruth A. Sasaki

R.A. Sasakiis a third-generation San Franciscan. She attended the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, has a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and an M.A. in Creative Writing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555971571
• ISBN13: 9781555971571
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 118 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Bay Area Stories

Ms. Sasaki has developed a very readable style of sharing Life's many events with the rest of us, and I for one would like to have her go from Short Story to full featured Novel. I know she has many more people and adventures to share with the rest of us, and after all, isn't it a Universal Human Trait to be captivated by stories of people and their lives... the ups and downs, the memories of the past, the complications of the present, and the hope(s) for the future? Loom was nice, and I shall continue to immerse myself into each story, but we also need to move on and grow the stories from where they are into an entire community. Let me start it off with the central character hearing from someone she has not seen in 37 years... and with the future rich in possibilities, allowing it to unfold into what turns out to be a long series of interesting conversations that blossom into wide ranging goings-on shared over warm cups of very flavorful and rich tasting Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. I can hardly wait...

beautiful, lilting prose

I picked this book up as an afterthought in a coffee shop while waiting for some tea. I'm glad that I did. I read the stories quickly, and I will read them again more slowly the next time, and then probably will return again. Some short stories are delicious for their intricate little plots. These stories lift the veil from a life, or rather, a kind of life, and let us see a world for a little while, although we are never allowed entirely to enter. This hovering on the threshold is what will bring me back to these stories; Sasaki has created a place that I would like to pass through again, as in a train, peering through the windows at a world both near and far. The world of this book is one both familiar to me and strange. I have lived in San Francisco, but in a different dimension than the one of which Sasaki writes. How unexpected to discover the streets I knew again through different eyes. San Francisco is not a big city; it is a town, but one which folds on itself, and contains a great deal more history than is first apparent. Sasaki has revealed some of this history to me, and for that I am grateful. Sasaki's stories are quiet creatures that like to linger. I hope that others will choose to let them in.

Powerful words

The Loom and Other Stories was an excellent work of fiction that departs from traditional portrayals of Asian American mother-daughter relationship by portraying both the mothers and daughters with dignity and intellectual assertiveness. Sasaki creates a world where strong characters free themselves from their past in order to find potential in their futures. What makes this achievement even more remarkable is Sasaki's ability to jump between generations--some stories focus on third generation daughters of women who endured the internment camps, while others focus on the second generation women who endured the camps themselves. Both groups maintain their dignities as human beings.My only criticism was that it would have been nice to learn more about the Terasaki family that Sasaki describes in her first four stories. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eight stories are not related to the first four, and as a reader I felt a bit unsatiated when Sasaki decided to leve the Terasakis in order to write about other families. At the same time, there is no denying that this is one of the finer works of fiction describing the Asian American experience, and for that it deserves five stars.