White Boys and River Girls

By Paula K. Gover

Book Overview

The Southern Review and LSU Short Fiction Award, 1995. Here are barmaids and black musicians, single mothers and burnt-out businessmen, all struggling a little too close to the edge in lives where a lot is at risk. These nine stories draw on Paula Gover's own experience--as an army wife living in a trailer in Georgia and as an often unemployed single mother back in her Michigan hometown. A daring new writer who brings richness and depth to her fiction, Gover slices into ordinary American lives and exposes what it is that makes each one extraordinary.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565120493
• ISBN13: 9781565120495
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Length: 225 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.3" x 1.0" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

if you like flannery o'connor, you'll like this....

gover has an ear for the way people talk...she gets the speech and and the diction down pat....you feel the southern vibe in each of these stories, yet it's never contrived...best are " white boys and river girls," about a laborer who becomes involed with a girl who may or may not be an half-breed. " he's been called nigger before." about a boy and his relationship with his estrained father..." black boy in a white girl's world," is about a singer on the verge of making it big and his many pursuits with pale-skinned females...

classic American short stories

These are excellent, well wraught tales of love, life and the persuit of happiness rife with realistic "regular" characters. The straight-forward narrative and clear vocabulary give the readers a very easy handle to hold these stories- that's if these stories haven't already taken hold of the readers. Larry Brown is quoted on the cover, as if that's not a fine enough endorsement already.

Very well done, a pleasure to read and ponder...

I knew the author and her family well. This lovely book abounds with the sensitivity and acute perception which has doubtless been the cause of some personal anguish over the years. These stories are exquisitely crafted, their perfectly chosen words and phrasing serving to pull the reader intimately into the characters. Paula has a way of striking a resonant emotional chord within her readers. These stories are well worth reading...and rereading.

A book to examine your own life by.

Paula K. Glover is a writer of great promise and a master of the short story genre. This collection offers many insights to the human condition from points of view all over the map. Reading it helped lend a perspective to my own life, like looking into a fun house mirror. Her ability to speak from the heart of both men and women is amazing.

How can this book rank #200000in sales? It's great!

In a nutshell: I just finished John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and it was quite boring and mechanical. Paula Gover's collection of stories was just the opposite! If you want stories that are full of life, uniqueness, and detail, read this collection! It (she) deserves a wide readership!