Reviews for Whore's Child and Other Stories

The average rating for Whore's Child and Other Stories based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-30 00:00:00 Jennifer Mabbayad Short story collection consisted of 7 stories. Some of the stories were good, some were meh, and one was very good. Fortunately, that very good story was the last one I read, so that l closed off the book on a high note. I want to read his 'Empire Falls' which garnered Russo a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Sometimes it takes me a while to get to a book…like 19 years. 🙃 As for this collection the one I liked to the most was 'The Mysteries of Linwood Hart' [5 stars]. About a 10-year-old boy being aware of the world around him and at the beginning of the story he was very egocentric as if the world revolved around him, and at the end of the story he was aware that the world got along fine with or without him. Throughout it all he seemed like a good kid. There were some stories where I felt the writing was contrived…anyhoo here are the stories and where they were originally published. The story above appears to have been first published in this collection, while the others had been published previously, mostly in periodicals. • The Whore's Child'Harpers, February 1998 [3.5 stars] • Monhegan Light'Esquire, August 2001 [2.5 stars] • The Farther You Go'Shenandoah [3 stars], Russo later developed the characters into the 1997 novel Straight Man. • Joy Ride'Meridian, Fall 1998 [3 stars] • Buoyancy, High infidelity 24 Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors. Publisher: William Morrow & Company, 1998) [2.5 stars] • Poison, Kiosk, xx [1 star] • The Mysteries of Linwood Hart [5 stars] Reviews: • Good review to read! • •

Review # 2 was written on 2007-07-01 00:00:00 Scott Henson Richard Russo, once a teacher of writing himself, opens his debut collection of short stories, The Whore's Child, in familiar territory: the classroom. Sister Ursula, who is "nearly as big as a linebacker," deposits herself in the narrator's advanced writing workshop, uninvited and unregistered. Despite the professor's insistence that she write fiction -- "In this class we actually prefer a well-told lie," he tells her -- she submits for the class's consideration several hefty installments of rock-pure memoir. She patted my hand, as you might the hand of a child. "Never you mind," she then assured me, adjusting her wimple for the journey home. "My whole life has been a lie." "I'm sure you don't mean that," I told her. But of course she did. Sister Ursula is constitutionally incapable of writing what is not true. On the other hand, she is equally incapable of seeing clearly what she writes'and this is what provides Russo's story, if not the nun's, the thrum of good fiction. In a post-modern and un-Russo-like twist, "The Whore's Child" is both the perfect short story and the blueprint for such a story. As the professor summarizes Sister Ursula's bitter and lonely take (he provides only her knife-edged first lines, like "It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the Church"), we also hear the class's response. It is in this unlikely arena, marked by PC angst and academic jargon, that Sister Ursula discovers a secret she has been hiding from herself her entire life. Sister Ursula, we come to understand, is the ideal practitioner of the "well-told lie." Russo's regular beat, it should be said, is men, not nuns, sons, not sisters. Through five fat, summer-perfect novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, the author has explored, with wonderful humor and pathos, that great American, impotent male. From the down-and-out Sully in Nobody's Fool to the hapless but good-hearted Miles in Empire Falls, Russo's protagonists are mere skeletons of the 1950s ideal they were weaned on. Where their fathers lived in an age of straightforward, powerful men, they have reached middle age in a time of ironic self-contempt. Read my full review here: