Alligator Dance: Stories (Southwest Life & Letters) - Tapa dura

The richly textured stories in Janet Peery's debut collection nearly always depict people caught between two places - literal or figurative - or trying to understand the mysteries of a place in which they have found themselves and to apply that understanding to their lives. Whether the territory is cultural, sexual, or social, its bedrock is the heart. In "South Padre" an Oklahoma farmer and his wife take a trip to the Texas Gulf Coast where they encounter a test of their marriage and - each in a different way - the limits of their knowledge. Set in 1950s Milwaukee, "Alligator Dance" depicts a fourth grader's sexual awakening as she is attracted and repelled by a Polish boy's totemic words, images, and their mysterious meanings, and by her own confusing desires. Eager to please her lawyer father, a young girl in "The Waco Wego" accompanies him to a meeting with a murderer's mother at a truckstop where she confronts the complexities of blame, morality, knowledge, and compassion. In "Nosotros" the daughter of a Mexican maid in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, angered by her mother's subservience, is forced to examine her own relationship with the son of her mother's employer. The title story was listed as one of one hundred distinguished stories in The Best American Short Stories 1992. Two of the stories received Pushcart prizes, "Nosotros" appearing in Pushcart XVI and "Whitewing" in Pushcart XVII. "What the Thunder Said" will appear in the 1993 edition of Best American Short Stories.