The Practical Heart: Four Novellas

(Paperback)

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Description

In his fictional Falls, North Carolinaa watchful zone of stifling moresAllan Gurganuss fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, betrayal. Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while creating a rarely-glimpsed world of valor, minor grandeur, side-street heroics.

Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted grand-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and 18th-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truthssometimes bruising, ofttimes warmingfrom human hearts as immense as they are local.

Reviews

Gurganus is an old-fashioned yarn spinner. . . . [The Practical Heart] reanimates all those familiar truths about arts power to transform and redeem. The New York Times

As intriguing as it is deadly funny. . . . An entertaining, disturbing, and inspiring book . . . [from] one of our greatest living raconteurs. The Atlantic Monthly

Gurganuss commitment to the importance of suffering and the power of art to redeem it, so like Henry James, blows through [these stories] like a cold wind of truth. Newsday

There is no other American writer working from his recipe, and nobody dishing it out with such full-throated gusto. The Washington Post

Author Bio

Allan Gurganus lives in a small town in North Carolina. The title novella of this book won the National Magazine Prize. His other honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.