A Place between Stations

by Stephanie Allen

Overview

A Place between Stations explores the lives of African American characters against the ever-present backdrop of race, but with the myriad complexities of individual minds and souls in the foreground. Two college students, bound by an intense but uneasy friendship, take an increasingly dangerous road trip through Florida. A widow faces her doubts about her long-dead husband by reliving an odd series of train rides she took along the Hudson River shoreline in the 1950s. An angry, fatherless girl roams a city at night, searching for an escape from the ambiguities of childhood. George Mattie, loner and reluctant guide, leads a misfit nineteenth-century circus caravan on an ill-fated journey through the northern Connecticut woods. In A Place between Stations, Stephanie Allen enlarges contemporary notions of what African American lives can be. Varied, to the point, and beautifully composed, this collection will appeal to all audiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826271624
Publisher:	University of Missouri Press
Publication date:	02/03/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	206 KB

About the Author

Stephanie Allen is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maryland in College Park. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. She received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2002, and was a finalist in the 2001 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Short Fiction. She lives with her husband in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Table of Contents

	Carved in Vinyl	1
	Mud Show	15
	Close to the Body	31
	Souvenir	48
	Marisol's Things	69
	Keep Looking	82
	Passage	90
	Saint Sebastian Street	106
	Yearbook	123
	Behind the Black Curtain	144
	A Place between Stations	159

Editorial Reviews

Eleven debut stories from a voice determined to transcend the barrier of race. Allen's characters are mostly African-American, but you'd never really know it-these pieces often take place without the subject of race ever coming to the fore. Unlike a lot of fiction based on American racial tension, Allen's tales shoot for a deeper, more profound experience, one that sometimes includes race but never relies on it. "Carved in Vinyl" concerns a woman whose assent into middle age triggers memories of a simpler time, when things were all "boss" and R&B; the title story follows a man on what may be his final ride home from work, an event inspiring quiet contemplation of life and marriage; the movement of a circus from town to town ("Mud Show") makes for a convincing period piece and a potentially violent forum when an elephant gets sick and may go haywire; while "Marisol's Things" follows two young sisters as they make the trek through childhood, young adulthood, eventual estrangement, and finally a subtle form of forgiveness. "Keep Looking" is a second-person account of a woman in a bookstore who feels a man's eyes on her back; and another woman's unusual medical condition makes for the stuff of freak shows in a period piece set in 1919. Much of the time, there seems a need in Allen to resist the penetration of race into her stories-and it's a relief that she succeeds in banishing that customary obligation, to the extent she can, as does Tiffany, in "Yearbook:": "She clenches the cross in a fist, reels back, and throws it as far away from her as she can. But it is very light, and travels only a few yards before it drops in the grass and lies there, glinting dully back at her." Refreshinglysimple: A flexible new voice able to record the more subtle effects of racial tension.

Kirkus Reviews

"I see threads and glimmers of almost any good writer I could name, and, of course, originality of vision, of technique, of language . . . and characters I've never before seen or even imagined. Allen's is a career I will follow with both great hope and great expectation."—Reginald McKnight

"Stephanie Allen is a writer who gets down to business, right in the first paragraph, and one who wastes few, if any, words. Her stories are beautifully shaped. Once she gets your attention, she holds it."—Steve Yarbrough

From the Publisher