Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781593501006
ISBN: 1593501005
Label: Alyson Books
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Alyson Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2008-09-01
Publisher: Alyson Books
Studio: Alyson Books

Jim Grimsley, novelist and playwright, holds no apologies when providing the psychological reasoning for human emotions in this first-time collection of his short stories.

Jim Grimsley is a PEN/Hemingway Awardwinning author. He is senior writer-in-residence at Emory University and has been playwright in residence at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta since 1986. He also is the author of several works of fiction, including Dream Boy (soon to be a major motion picture).

Customer Rating:
Summary: New Dark Stories by Jim Grimsley
Comment: Jim Grimsley's latest book JESUS IS SENDING YOU THIS MESSAGE, with an introduction by Dorothy Allison, consists of sixteen short stories, most of them fully developed while a few are hardly more than vignettes. The truth in these dark stories-- of which the breadth of the subject matter is pretty amazing-- is not found on angels' wings. Mr. Grimsley does write about both child sexual and spousal abuse, as he has done previously, in the haunting "Silver Bullet" But in "Unbending Eye" he grapples with the ethical question of whether or not scientists have the right to revive someone from the dead and keep him as a virtual prisoner because their experiments "could be of benefit to billions of people." The narrator in "Wendy," in a story as macabre as Joyce Carol Oates' tale of a robot-like Emily Dickinson in "Wild Nights" creates a machine that is in essence an eight-year-old girl. The first line of "We Move In A Rigorous Line" says it all: "He sat in an airplane heading helplessly out to sea." An incapacitated pilot and his passenter, "some rich bigwig from an oil company," face certain death as their plane loses cabin pressure. In "New Jerusalem," Lomax, an artist who walks with crutches, dreams of taking a one-way trip to the moon, not in keeping with her fundamentalist mother's world view: "I don't know why she talks like that. I take her to church." Lomax takes quite a different trip, however, and meets a fate forewarned of by a strange woman named Estabelle who tells her: "The handwriting is on the wall."

The two best stories are "The Virtual Maiden" and "Jesus Is Sending You A Message" that are as good as anything else Mr. Grimsley has written, including DREAM BOY and WINTER BIRDS. In the first story two men living together hire a woman with Down syndrome to clean their cluttered, messy home. A gesture of kindness on the part of the younger man, who is more than twenty years younger than his lover, results in an unexpected complicated love triangle. The author writes beautifully and with tremendous insight about the human heart. The older narrator on his lover Randall: "The first morning we were ever together, when we had made love very sweetly and I understood how thoughtful he was, I already knew he would never love me very much, but that he would never love me any less than that." In "Jesus Is Sending You This Message," a near perfect short story set in Atlanta, the narrator, a white daily train rider, becomes obsessed and angry with an older well-dressed black woman who is compelled to testify in a loud voice on a daily commute of the imminent return of Jesus and the destruction of the wicked. The narrator, who attends a local Episcopal church, wonders if the testifier's Christ is more real than his.

Mr. Grimsley dedicates "New Jerusalem" to Flannery O'Connor, who would be pleased with that story and with "Jesus Is Sending You This Message" as well as several of the other stories included here. After all, it was she who opined that Southerners write about freaks so often because they can still recognize them. Mr. Grimsley obviously is the literary child of Ms. O'Connor.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Revelations
Comment: Grimsley, Jim. "Jesus is Sending You This Message: Stories", Alyson, 2008.

Revelations

Amos Lassen

I have always enjoyed reading Jim Grimsley and so when his new collection of short stories arrived, I cleared my schedule and sat down to read. These are very clever stories and sharp and powerful.
Grimsely explores the nature of how we exist and as I read I was held spellbound by the beauty of the language. Our world is a hard place to live in and is many times unforgiving. As Grimsley looks at the human soul, we see the limitations and boundaries that are placed on us. Using both elements of fantasy and science-fiction, Grimsley adds yet another layer to the fantastic. There are stories about the southern United States and there are all kinds of stories here. Grimsley does not limit himself to the gay experience but also writes about aging and romance with a lyric realism that is beautiful. These are stories about ordinary people like you and me and there are those who are already dead and those who are struggling with survival. There were times I felt as if I was reading poetry and not prose. The themes of compassion and love seem to govern the stories and the lack of compromise is amazing. Grimsely takes the role of a camera lens as he focuses and refocuses and always presents what he sees, adorned but powerful.

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