The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories

by Judith Slater

Overview

Judith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories introduces a writer who approaches the world at a surprisingly oblique angle. Judith Slater writes in a prose dance, dramatizing the lives of ordinary people who wonder what they can do to bring more passion into their lives, or at least less loneliness.

The characters in these stories are a diverse bunch-a floral clerk with aspirations of being a ballet dancer, a photographer volunteering to take the pictures at his ex-girlfriendÕs wedding, a father playing the role of reluctant chaperon at his daughter's school dance-but all of them are alert to the moments of possibility, transcendence, and sometimes even magic that exist just under the surface of ordinary life.

Slater is unafraid to employ the surreal or absurd twist: in the title story, a woman creates a perfect baby in her mind; in "Phil's Third Eye," a chance encounter at a Laundromat ends in a bizarre battle of wills; in "Our New Life," a woman finds that her former therapist has decided to make the same drastic change in her own life as she had encouraged in her patient's, and a strange challenge is issued to decide who has taken the greater risk; the narrator of "Soft Money," worried about job security in the large corporation she works for, hits upon a unique solution to the problem of downsizing.

In vivid, witty prose, Judith Slater presents a world where people come together and make do, as they learn to live with the odd possibilities in life.

Judith Slater grew up in Oregon and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her stories have appeared in Redbook, Seventeen, Greensboro Review, Sonora Review, American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Colorado Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she lives during the academic year. She spends her summers in Ashland, Oregon.

"Judith Slater is a writer whose work rings true to experience: her observation of the world is keen, reported

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781889330358
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	11/01/1999
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Judith Slater grew up in Oregon and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her stories have appeared in Redbook, Seventeen, Greensboro Review, Sonora Review, American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Colorado Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she lives during the academic year. She spends her summers in Ashland, Oregon.

Foreword

Judith Slater is a writer whose work rings true to experience: her observation of the world is keen, reported in a prose distinguished by fresh imagery and clever turns of phrase. Her style is deft, not light, the difference being that deftness is an aspect of grace. Her dialogue sounds like human voices. She has an eye for subtle details, physical and psychological, that make her characters come alive and maintain their credibility, even in those instances less than credible. . . She is a writer who understands that the first allegiance of fiction is to the imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Judith Slaters new stories are rich with keen descriptions and characters that span the breadth of human emotion. . . . Several moments in the collection provoke visceral responses.

Rain Taxi

The first page is cracked and the reader ventures in. A treasure trove of short fiction awaits. A collection equally at home in an English class and on the bedside table.

Foreword Magazine

Slaters collection of thirteen stories possesses a wonderfully original voice and a zest for offbeat characters. . . . she has a clean style in which she always returns to images that make each story work as a whole. The result is outstanding.

The 1998 Mary McCarthy Prize-winner for short fiction is a promising first collection of 13 stories that tread the fine line between sweet reflection and bittersweet sentimentality. The title story is one of the shorter pieces in the collection; its cool, palpable rhythm translates an infant's unintelligible but soulful cooing and sighing into exhilarating song. The cadence of this piece conveys Slater's potential to undergird her pretty prose with a solid, deeper beat. In "The Bride's Lover," Slater juxtaposes the moony grief of a brooding man, invited to be the photographer at his ex-lover's wedding, with quick images of the less-than-perfect scene: the vicious cat preying on hummingbirds, the ravaged buffet table, a tipsy and bleary-eyed relative. Anyone who has tried to daydream out of a windowless office or a cramped cubicle will appreciate the suggestion, in "Soft Money," of how to decorate one's working space to the hilt. Forget about mauve ergonomic chairs: why not luminescent blue walls, a wrought-iron four poster bed for comfy reading and a reflecting pool with goldfish? Other jovial but whimsical tales include one about a therapist who takes her own advice and winds up trading places with one of her patients. Imaginative, humorous and showing an impressive range of styles and insights, Slater only occasionally verges into mawkishness, and usually only when she's depicting the romantic regrets of her lonely characters. Innocent, yearning young girls; clumsy, hard-drinking buddies; and workaday women coping with solitude or love--all come to life with Slater's offbeat humor, subtle touches of irony and compassionate storytelling. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A debut collection of 13 stories by academic Slater (Univ. of Nebraska/English), whose efforts won her the 1998 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Slater has a light touch, which lends a grace to her work that's as welcome (in its lack of pretense) as it is rare. The standard contemporary themes—domestic and social life—predominate, but Slater's characters have a sense of humor and enough of a sharp ironic edge to keep them from sinking into the quicksand of self-absorption. The title piece, for example, is an interior monologue of a new mother who tries, as all new mothers do, to envision the life of the baby whose future has suddenly eclipsed her own. Nuanced and extremely subtle, it makes good use of the classic pattern of parental affections played against actual reality, as does "Pretty Night," which portrays a middle-aged father's sympathetic pain in the face of his daughter's social unease at a school dance. Other pieces have a decidedly fantastic edge to them: "Our New Life" offers an amusingly literal take on the process of transference that occurs between a psychologist and her patient, while "Soft Money" shows the effect of environment upon attitude through the adventures of an a man who redecorates his office and actually creates a new world. "The Things We Find" depicts two unhappy teenage baby-sitters who rummage through the homes of their clients looking for evidence that all domestic life is as flawed as their own, while "Sandra Dee Ate Here" is about a young waitress trying to start over again after the collapse of her marriage. The restraint with which Slater handles her characters' overwhelming melancholy is remarkable. It is exactly thisunderstatement that makes her fiction so poignant and striking. Memorable and rich: Slater brings an extraordinary precision to the delineation of everyday sorrows and the indomitable hopes they generate.

Kirkus Reviews