if you were a girl if they play football or just want to play just one game of football.
Often, to me, Nordan feels like a guilty pleasure, like the Phantom Tollbooth or something pitched far below an adult reading level.
But then his timing is too flawless, his characters too lovingly and believably drawn, his dialect too memorable and his bizarreness too unexpected for me to give him the gold star of "good subway reading" and move on.
He might actually be a good writer,
"John Thomas Bird" and "The AllGirl Football Team" are the obvious sitelinksuccess stories of the collection and "The Farmers' Daughter" is the fumble.
I can't tell yet what portion of the enjoyment I get from this man's stories comes from the fact that I have now read four novels worth of his effort to create one, stable, wellpopulated fictional counterpart to Yawknapawtapha county.
Nordan focuses exclusively on the marginal, uneducated, strange, dysfunctional, innocent and lovable sort of folks that American novels are so agonizingly filled with.
But he does it better than any other American author that I have read, He does it without constant selfconscious and selfcongratulatory cultural and literary references and without deploying any wry, triumphant, hyperaware characters he is also not burdened with an agenda at least his agenda doesn't seem to go beyond hoping that his readers will become less condemning of gender confused young men.
If you don't like the two stories I singled out above, don't bother reading anything else by Nordan.
If you do enjoy them, he has filled hundreds and hundreds of pages with material you might have trouble defending your taste for.
I consider myself a Nordan fan, but this collection of stories was terribly disappointing, They meandered around a bit but essentially went nowhere, Even sideshow freaks and eunuchs running amuck couldn't make these tales memorable, Sigh. Nordan reminds me of O'Connor in this collection, He knows that normal is only an idea, that everyone is a freak in some way and it is in examining that freakishness that the most universal aspects of humanity can be revealed.
All of these stories are very good, but "Sugar Among the Chickens" is almost brilliant, The title alone. The story is full of one hysterical line after another, The story doesn't rely on them to work, but they make the story just that much more amazing, I mean, where do you get lines like "I had been fishing for an hour and still hadn't caught anything.
I was fishing for chickens, " Gold. Absolute gold. The opening story, "Sugar Among the Chickens", is amazing, I would have to rank it among my favorite short stories of all time, Very well written and very, very funny, The remainder of the book, however, does not compare, Welcome to Arrow Catchet, Mississippi, a Delta town whose air is filled with "innocence and ripe apples, " But to Sugar Mecklin, a young boy who is the central character in many of these marvelous stories, it is also a place "where freaks grow like magic from the buckshot and gumbo, where eunuchs roam the Delta flatscape looking for Episcopalians.
" Sugar's mother spends her days creating imaginary lives for models in her Sears and Roebuck catalog, Daddy keeps a black suit with the words "Rock 'n' Roll Music" spelled out in sequins on the back hidden in his closet.
Sugar searches for a way to grow up with dignity, and finds resources he never knew he had, While fishing for chickens in the yard, he lands a rooser on his head instead: "My parents were proud of me.
They believed that a man who has worn a chicken on his head would never be a fool to geography or marriage or alcohol.
"
Lewis Nordan's magical, often sidesplittingly funny tales are triumphs of Southern storytelling, Something of a mixed bag of short fiction, Lewis Nordan's The AllGirl Football Team is a slim volume of stories about the south.
Taken as a whole, it's an uneven and slightly offkilter collection, with the individual stories ranging from decent to good.
Several of them, including this collection's two best stories the title story and Sugar Among the Chickens take place in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town that's something like a Lynch movie: a trailer of dwarfs next door, Episcopalians roaming around the country in a van and a mom who invents lives for models in a Sears catalogue.
These are the most offcenter of Nordan's stories and they're all slightly connected, with references often getting repeated between stories perhaps a draft of a novel These stories are the best part of this book, showing Nordan's gift for mixing the absurd with the dark: there are odd stories that flip from being funny to depressing without changing a beat.
The rest of the book isn't quite as good, though, and keeps this from getting a higher rating.
Not really recommended, but you could do worse when looking for a short story collection, I was on an allgirl football team that was much more fun than this, The Sugar stories stand out far beyond the rest, and for good reason, Still, this is a great collection, My friend Nathaniel Calhoun recommended this book, and I concur that it is a treasure, The narrative detail of the stories reminds me of my brother Tom's work, and I hope that some of my "speechies" will use the story for competition pieces.
Short story collections are difficult for me since you should really rate them as a whole, . . not just one or two that stick out, I loved a couple liked a few and didn't like one, So I suppose that means I liked it I usually done care for short stories with a few exceptions I just want to read anything I can find by Mr.
Nordan. The first half of this collection focuses on the adventures of southern junior Sugar Mecklin while the second is made up of varied stories each with its own set of characters.
Some of the Sugar stories were a bit boring but otherwise Nordan managed to make me grin, snigger and feel physically grossed out as I made my way through this slender volume.
Essential stories are 'John Thomas Bird' and of course 'The AllGirl Football Team' not just a ripper title but so arresting I had a dream about it the night after reading.
With a fair blend of unpredictability and harmony across the stories its worthwhile tracking down despite its flaws, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaLewis Nordan August,April,was an American writer, Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, He received his B. A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M, A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph, D. from Auburn University in Alabama, In, at age forty five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow Catcher Fair, The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery OConnor.
It also established a place for Nordans fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delt From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaLewis Nordan August,April,was an American writer.
Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, He received his B. A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M, A. from Mississippi State University, and his Ph, D. from Auburn University in Alabama, In, at age forty five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow Catcher Fair, The collection established him as a writer in the grotesque Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor.
It also established a place for Nordans fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordans hometown of Itta Bena.
After the short story collection The All Girl Football Teamfollowed Music of the Swamp, a novel/short story cycle featuring Nordan's spiritual alter ego, the young Sugar Mecklin, as the protagonist.
The book features aspects of magic realism that would become one of Nordan's trademarks, along with a peculiar mix of the tragic and the hilarious.
Wolf Whistle, Nordan's second novel, was both a critical and public success, It won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience, The book deals with one of the most notorious racial incidents in recent Southern history: the murder of Emmett Till.
The novel The Sharpshooter Bluesis a lyrical meditation on America's gun culture, as well as another portrait of the grotesque lives in Itta Bena.
With the coming of age novel Lightning Song, Nordan moved from Itta Bena to the hill country of Mississippi, The novel still features Nordan's magic Mississippi realism, complete with singing llamas and poetic lightning strikes, In, Nordan published a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun, Before retiring in, Lewis Nordan lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, sitelink.