The Truly Needy and Other Stories

by Lucy Honig

Overview

Winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Charles JohnsonThese nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and "quality-of-life" campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy Honig's fiction, one is willingly drawn into an intimacy with these resilient, but flawed characters—among them, a woman who cleans a beauty salon, a high school kid who's lost a parent, a runaway Cambodian bride, an actress, and a homeless woman. Crossing paths, these difficult characters often misunderstand and sometimes demean each other, yet they also redeem and rescue one other in odd and unexpected ways. In The Truly Needy, Lucy Honig has created a heartbreaking, imaginative world that is the American urban landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822978794
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/15/1999
Series:	Drue Heinz Literature Prize Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	552 KB

About the Author

Lucy Honig's stories have appeared in two O. Henry Prize story collections, and in Best American Short Stories, as well as in DoubleTake, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Witness, Agni, and other magazines. Her first novel, Picking Up, was published by Dog Ear Press. She has received the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship and a Northwood Institute Creativity Center Fellowship. For many years she juggled writing with work that ranged from farming in the Maine woods and teaching English to immigrants in Brooklyn to directing a county human rights commission in upstate New York. Since 1995 she has taught in the graduate program in International Health at Boston University's School of Public Health. She lives just outside of Boston.

Table of Contents

Contents No Friends, All Strangers English as a Second Language After Hilda The Sights of Cork The Truly Needy Quartet The Truly Needy Refuge Love, Rescue, Care, Dream, Sweep Dispossessed Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Whether depicting a troubled teenager with a crush on her high school English teacher, an immigrant from Guatemala who cleans rooms at the Plaza Hotel or a lonely beauty salon employee who human ties consist principally of those she imagines with fellow subway riders, Lucy Honig draws the characters in her first collection with deft, sympathetic strokes. Most of the book’s nine stories are set in or near Manhattan. In a series of interlocking stories entitled, The Truly Needy Honig brings a group of unrelated people—a social service organization director with a midlife crisis, her secretary, a Cambodian refugee who is haunted by her past, a homeless couple and actors filing a scene about life on the street—into uncanny relationships with one another. Along the way, she illustrates how the social boundaries that separate us are so often dependent on chance. Honig’s characters never degenerate into types or sink into self-pity, but soldier on, displaying courage in untenable situations and compassion where we might least expect to find it.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Distinctive not only for its beautifully precise prose and compelling characters, but also for its ability to see ‘the worst and still come back,’ as one character says. . . .There is much more to say about The Truly Needy and what it reveals about the cross-pollination of cultural values, the mishmash of the personal and the political, our desire to belong. [These stories] quietly, slyly, and convincingly remind us of the human potential for decency.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Nine stories, set mostly in New York City, make up Honig’s second collection, brimming with complex, vividly drawn characters teetering  precariously between alienation and empathy, displacement and communion, despair and perseverance. . . . Convincing detail and candid, insightful narrative draw the reader deep into the lives of these ordinary people and their sometimes extraordinary revelations. Honig permeates the collection with a quirky hopefulness in the resilience of these memorable characters and their unexpected moments of human connection—even as they struggle, with quiet heroism, to make their place in a modern world they can neither control nor explain.”

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher