Illustrating their conviction that fiction-writing and fiction-reading are natural and mutually nourishing activities, the editors of ABOUT THESE STORIES: Fiction for Fiction Writers and Readers, have compiled a text of 18-24 short stories, many contemporary designed for creative writing or introduction to fiction courses. Each story is followed by an essay from one of the editors, suggesting approaches to reading, seeing structure and technique, and interpreting the work. As the editors point out, the stories included embody useful answers to questions important to writers, concerning plot, point of view, characterization, and atmosphere. They illustrate methods of dealing with fictional material that students can learn from and draw on for their own creative or interpretive work. The essays are natural responses to the stories they accompany, and will inspire story writers to write more stories and story readers to have their say in writing about these stories.

About These Stories

Reference

Huddle, David

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages

Acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and poet, David Huddle captivates us with a new collection. Not: A Trio is a sequence of three related stories that, taken together, form a unified work of fiction. This faceted approach is especially suited to a work that reveals the intricate connections among Danny Marlow, Claire McClelland, and Ben McClelland. Danny, Claire and Ben are thoughtful people who know each other well―yet hardly at all. Danny narrates the first story, introducing the reader to Claire, a therapist who has, he says “lived a life that would drop most men in their tracks.” The second story, told in the third person, explores the character of Claire’s second husband Ben. These two men and their stories set the stage for the appearance of Claire in the third and most powerful story. Claire informs the reader at the outset that a crisis looms: “At any rate, I’m not going to be able to go on with the life I have so carefully constructed for myself here in town.” Huddle is especially concerned with the forces that separate these singular individuals from each other―and from themselves―as well as with the romantic and sexual energy pulling Danny and Claire together and with the wistful intimacy briefly held between Claire and Ben. In the process, the book also draws a darkly humorous picture of small-town life in contemporary Vermont. Critics have praised David Huddle for his skill in creating individual voices and selves that work together to reveal intimately connected lives. He has done so once again in Not: A Trio, leaving the reader with what feels like a secret understanding of these three people and the forces that move them.

Not: A Trio

Literature & Fiction

United States

University of Notre Dame Press

An affair between a fifteen-year-old girl and one of her parent's friends has long-term emotional consequences as the major players remain tethered to each other through a series of tangled relationships. Tour.

The Story of a Million Years

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Fleeing her failing marriage, art history professor Suzanne Nelson seeks refuge in her imagination and in the enigmatic work and world of sixteenth-century painter Georges de La Tour as she invents the artist's final painting sessions with a young model who possesses a thatch of wolflike hair growing across her back. 15,000 first printing.

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl

The acclaimed poet and story writer David Huddle weaves a masterly portrait of two couples and their shared histories, desires, and secrets. Marcy, Allen, Uta, Jimmy -- each becomes the hero of his or her own story, as all mine the past for evidence of goodness. David Huddle moves with remarkable agility from the imagination of a precocious adolescent girl, to the fears of a man in midlife, to the longings of a wife whose reserve cloaks aching depths. Each of these convincing voices asks the questions central to all our lives: What stories are so important that you'd never reveal them to another person in a million years? How do secrets come to define us, for better or for worse? Honest, accomplished, and wonderfully subtle, THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS portrays the basic human desire to love and be loved unconditionally.

The Story Of A Million Years

Harper-perennial

In this absorbing novel, the award-winning author David Huddle tells a provocative story involving the life of the mysterious painter Georges de La Tour and the echoes of his work across time. An art history professor, Suzanne Nelson escapes her failing marriage by retreating into her research and the fertile world of her imagination. La Tour's ability to create luminous portraits of peasants stood in sharp contrast to his aggression toward the poor, but little information about his life exists, and Suzanne finds herself filling in the details, trying to understand how a man capable of brutality could create such beauty. Unwittingly looking to her own life and marriage, she invents La Tour's final painting sessions with a young model, a village girl. When the girl modestly disrobes for the artist, he discovers a marking on her back that she is obviously unaware of. By painting her, La Tour in effect reveals to the girl exactly who she is and who she is not. Her reaction is at once astonishing and utterly warranted. In Suzanne's mind, this encounter becomes a story of truth and lies, art and identity. Deftly moving between the present and the seventeenth century, Huddle reveals the surprising repercussions of history and art in modern life. In the process he asks the biggest questions: How do we come to define who we are? Which secrets must remain our own and which can we justify giving away? LA TOUR DREAMS OF THE WOLF GIRL is both passionate and fascinating, a wonder of narrative invention and emotional depth.

La Tour Dreams Of The Wolf Girl: A Novel

Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

From Booklist Twenty years worth of Huddle's pristine and contemplative poems are collected here, the fruit of a poetic practice beautifully in tune with Huddle's superb fiction (see p.68). These poems are subtly chronographic in that they mark the changes time brings, and keep time with life's ever-modulating music. Huddle's earliest poems are respectfully down-home in their modest diction and straightforward accounts of rural small-town life, describing paper routes, threshing wheat, and sitting on the porch with Granddad while he takes potshots at grackles. Further on, Huddle writes just as directly and poignantly about his stint in Vietnam, but it is family that occupies him most consistently and evocatively. His paeans to his parents in their prime and elegies in their illness and death possess the profound matter-of-factness and dignity of William Carlos Williams. The decline of his elders is then balanced by the blossoming of his children, which, in turn, revolves around the sanctuary of marriage and the strangely static understanding of the self. Donna Seaman Product Description This is a compilation of David Huddle's poetry. It chronicles his life, disclosing the anthropology of the human spirit. It opens with a plainness of language and form and builds to an amalgamation of free and formal variety, including sonnets and a lengthy poem in terze rima. From Publishers Weekly After three previous books of poetry and four of short stories, this ample helping of Huddle's verse appears simultaneously with his impressive first novel, The Story of a Million Years (Forecasts, Aug. 2). Though Huddle writes "I confess/ to failures of love, truth and decency," he is less a confessional poet than a verse-essayist and storyteller: many poems are portraits, anecdotes or recollections of his family and his childhood in tiny Ivanhoe, Va. Always moving, never difficult, Huddle's formally unremarkable free verse and deliberately muted vocabulary seek the clearest possible understandings of his feelings and motives, and of his eccentric, pathetic or brave regional characters. Readers meet the fierce sixth-grade teacher Miss Florence Jackson; Grandmama Huddle, who "riled by Daylight Savings... kept her/ clocks unchanged"; and "my grandfather's hired man,/ Monkey Dunford,/ an illiterate, unsanitary,/ deeply ignorant/ and deeply kind/ Holy Roller." A few poems cover Huddle's tour of duty in Vietnam; an atypical sequence attempts a Merwinesque communion with nature. Much of the rest of the work concerns fathers and fatherhood. In "Gifts" father and son visit a toolshed: "He picked out/ the oldest hammer there,/ offered it to me,/ and I took it/ from his hand." Huddle's style hasn't changed much, though his poems from the 1970s tend toward shorter lines and a greater focus on childhood; some will please admirers of Stephen Dunn, or of the poetry of Raymond Carver. The 19 new poems in the volume's last section offer more rhythmic variety, along with a new and harrowing subject: the poet's mother's decline into Alzheimer's disease. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This sampling of 20 years (1979-99) of Huddle's poetry is a tribute to the vanished world of Wytheville, VA, in the 1950s as well as a carefully observed portrait of a family. Selections from four of Huddle's books and 19 new poems show how to make way "to the deeply remembered" that is "the context of love." Huddle's gift is in articulating the difficulties of staying connected with one's parents. Later poems try to come to terms with his father's prolonged death and with the terrible effects of Alzheimer's upon his mother. What Huddle owes them is what he owes himself and "the place where we live with our children." While family bonds embody permanent human value ("something always/ there to help us/ through the hard times"), these poems face up to tensions between different ages and genders. Transforming yearning

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with stunning effect. Summer Lake, a beautifully coherent compilation of Huddle’s best poetry to date, chronicles one late-twentieth-century American life, disclosing the anthropology of the human spirit.
The collection opens with a plainness of language and form born of the poet’s native Blue Ridge Mountains and builds to an amalgamation of free and formal variety, including sonnets and a lengthy poem in terza rima. It pauses over vivid childhood moments, visits the wounds from a “Tour of Duty” in Vietnam, and enters into that passage of deep adulthood during which one’s parents fall ill and die. These are ordinary life events, rendered with uncanny penetration. At times the poems are openly, even angrily, despairing. When all is said and done, though, the last two lines of the book are “my mother cooking supper / my father whistling as he walked home from work.”
Huddle’s web of experiences is near to all of our own stories―the universal cycle of making our own life, raising up new lives, and letting go of those that formed ours, and the need to continually rediscover who we are in the process. The hammer Huddle’s father gave him as a child (“My Daddy, Whenever He Went Some Place”) and the one he handed him soon after Huddle’s daughter was born (“Gifts”) both made the poet cry but for different reasons. Manly, heartbreakingly human, honest―“That’s what I hate,/when my good buzz of hostility/turns into this pissy pity”―Summer Lake reveals and moves, and ultimately consoles.

LSU Press

In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, "We think / we stand in the vivid color of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is - it's our future / that's the off-center, badly focused grayscale." Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected-and admittedly embellished-from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama's morning coffee, young daughters playing dolls. With age, wonder has become understanding, and so when intimations of his death arise in the midst of sharing a joke with his children, the poet shows us the comfort and peace that murky prospect may hold. Playful and fantastic narratives about penguin clans, Jane Goodall and the chimps, and what to do when it snaows offer wit and craft as further barriers against pain and despair. "In my family we were /all good at dreaming," Huddle's closing poem notes. Undaunted, Huddle gives us in Grayscale not false hopes about our lives but a range of ways to transcend their limits.

Grayscale: Poems

In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, “We think / we stand in the vivid color of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is ― it’s our future / that’s the off-center, badly focused grayscale.”
Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected―and admittedly embellished―from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama’s morning coffee, young daughters playing dolls. With age, wonder has become understanding, and so when intimations of his death arise in the midst of sharing a joke with his children, the poet shows us the comfort and peace that murky prospect may hold. Playful and fantastic narratives about penguin clans, Jane Goodall and the chimps, and what to do when it snaows offer wit and craft as further barriers against pain and despair. “In my family we were /all good at dreaming,” Huddle's closing poem notes. Undaunted, Huddle gives us in Grayscale not false hopes about our lives but a range of ways to transcend their limits.

Grayscale: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Huddle, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Huddle, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Huddle, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

About These Stories

Not: A Trio

The Story of a Million Years

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl

The Story Of A Million Years

La Tour Dreams Of The Wolf Girl: A Novel

Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

Summer Lake: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

Grayscale: Poems

Grayscale: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)