Her Father: A Memoir

by Bill Henderson

Overview

"Trenchant, iconoclastic, and heartfelt-in short, true."-Rick Moody

At his dying mother's bedside, Bill Henderson promised that he would finally settle down, after years of the single life in New York, and have a family. Following many marital ups and downs and hilarious misadventures, his daughter was born four years later. Her Father is a highly personal yet universally familiar account of one man's passage to fatherhood and concurrent spiritual reawakening. "A brave, warts-and-all memoir."-Booklist "A shivering, quaking memoir of broken faith that needed an earthly miracle . . . the raw truth."-Marvin Bell "An endearingly simple, straightforward love story."-Edward Hoagland

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781888889161
Publisher:	Pushcart Press, The
Publication date:	04/17/2000
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Bill Henderson is the founder and editor of the Pushcart Prize. He received the 2006 National Book Critic Circle’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Poets & Writers / Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. He is also the author of several memoirs, including All My Dogs: A Life. The founder of the Lead Pencil Club, Henderson lives on Long Island and In Maine where he runs the Pushcart bookstore – “the world’s smallest bookstore.”

Editorial Reviews

Czeslaw Milosz, Bobbie Ann Mason, Andre Dubus and Seamus Heaney are among the more prominent of the 60-plus writers represented in this generous and stimulatingly eclectic selection of fiction, poetry and essaysthe biggest anthology in the 21-year history of the Pushcart Press. Of particular note are probing essays about the link between faith and the writer's imagination (Dubus's "Love in the Morning"), a law professor's debilitation from a stroke (George Packer's "Disorder and Early Sorrow") and the dispiriting racial Balkanization of New York (Michael Stephens's "The Last White Man in Brooklyn"). Admirable, too, are Alan Shapiro's "Fanatics," in which the author describes his falling-out with a friend from childhood, an ardent convert to Hasidic Judaism, and Michael Kaniecki's mordant, unsettling essay on the impact the Holocaust hadand continues to haveon his Polish-American family ("Love Song for the SS"). Although the fiction is less wide-ranging, working mostly in the realist epiphanic mode, much of it is first-rate. Erin McGraw's "Daily Affirmations" plays out the bleak comedy of a self-help writer clashing with her parents at Thanksgiving. Helen Schulman's "The Revisionist" affectingly chronicles the mental unraveling of a Manhattan businessman. In Ranbir Sidhu's "Neanderthal Tongues," the corpse of an anthropologist meditates upon warring factions in Ethiopia and his distance from his own roots in India. The poetry is diverse, too; of particular note are the late James Merrill's "Christmas Tree," a delightful jeu d'esprit, and Loretta Collins's coolly observant "Fetish." Henderson's anthology is a welcome annual reminder of the vigor and breadth of the smaller presses. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When the first edition of this annual anthology was published in 1976, one prominent reviewer hailed it as "a big, colorful, cheerful, gratifying samplecase of 56 small-press works." That description still holds-only the numbers are bigger: This year's volume is the largest in Pushcart history, with 31 poems, 21 stories, and ten essays from some 44 of the nation's "noncommercial" journals. As with any collection this size, it's a mixed bag. But nowhere else are readers afforded the opportunity both to sample the wares of well-known contemporary American writers (Bobbie Ann Mason, Andre Dubus, Barry Lopez, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, and James Merrill) while making the acquaintance of so many new ones worth knowing. A "gratifying samplecase," indeed, and one that belongs on the shelves of every library. Highly recommended.-David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. Dist. Lib., Canton, Ohio

Library Journal

As always in the Pushcart collections of stories, essays, and poems from the little magazines, there is a wide range of quality and a good balance of names familiar and scarcely known.

Series editor and publisher Henderson has long had a sharp eye for talent and for the quirky, if not the trendy. Here, despite the expected occasional dud, he has culled interesting works from 44 sources ranging from the high-profile Paris Review to the low- profile The Baffler. The latter publication, in fact, chips in with one of the anthology's highlights, a lengthy essay titled "Dark Age: Why Johnny Can't Dissent," by Tom Frank. Among other astute jabs, Frank eschews what passes for political "dialogue" from public officials and those on the campaign trail in favor of business journals and papers like the Wall Street Journal. There, he says, is the place "to find serious talk about national affairs." Barry Lopez's tribute to the late Wallace Stegner is also a gem, as is Hope Edelman's "Bruce Springsteen and the Story of Us," wherein she confesses to losing her virginity to the throbbing beat of "Hungry Heart." There's a potent short story by S.L. Wisenberg called "Big Ruthie Imagines Sex Without Pain," which may remind some of Grace Paley, and another fine piece of work by Daniel Orozco, "The Bridge," in which a member of a painting crew comes face-to-face with a woman who's just leapt to her death. The poetry entries don't always measure up. Lackluster poems from Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney are offset by sharp work from Kim Addonizio and Loretta Collins, whose "Fetish" is a wickedly funny paean to shoes.

The Pushcart series is the best of its kind and a worthy effort simply because Henderson ignores the latest trends and fads and zeroes in on quality wherever he happens to find it.

Kirkus Reviews