To Be a Stranger

<p>Displacement, exile and return haunt the pages of Gaither Stewart's second short story collection, To Be A Stranger. Though most of the sixteen stories are set in the author's hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, the stories touch only lightly on the real Asheville, today's renowned tourism destination. Stewart says, ?The Asheville I depict rather hazily is the misty, intangible town I imagine from a distance or see when I visit there. It is a strange Asheville, an Asheville of great secrets, an Asheville of a distant past, an Asheville removed from the present. It is also an Asheville as a destination and a hope. It is the hometown of the exile, seen now close at hand, now in the past, now as in a dream.'In a way, the Asheville stories are my first attempts at coming to grips with my origins. Perhaps the town is a metaphor, as someone commented, because the stories are permeated by the idea of departure and return.'Stewart's characters, like the fictionalization of Asheville's most famous son in Look Homeward, Angel, are perplexed by return, uncertain of their place in the world. Likewise, characters peopling the Mexican or New York or European stories of To Be A Stranger want to be somewhere else--or someone else. Stash Luczkiw, editor of Milan's Cartier Art, praises the volume for its cosmopolitan portrayal of common human traits. ?Reading Stewart's stories is like playing a raucous game of connect-the-dots with these coordinates across sundry landscapes and languages. It is an effortless, smooth, always thoughtful and often humorous ride that can drop you off in the most unexpected pockets of turbulence'where you can see the world and mull over questions of freedom, chance, destiny and the human (all-too-human) condition.'In lyrical, personal language, To Be A Stranger explores the luxury of escape and the bittersweet joy of return.</p>

Stewart, Gaither

Wind River Pr

Clearly the work of an accomplished storyteller, ICY CURRENT, COMPULSIVE  COURSE tantalizes the reader with glimpses of a world gone by-and with  dreams of worlds yet to come.

Icy Current, Compulsive Course: Selected Stories

Literature & Fiction

Wind River Press

Once in Berlin

Literary

It is a misnomer to call this novel a spy story.  Though it chronicles the adventures and mishaps of a handful of spies, all looking for meaning in the world, it is more.  Above all it is a meditation on love, betrayal, duplicity, morality, the young, the old, Europe, America, the Soviet Union, terrorism and the Cold War. The book revolves around two characters from different ages and different worlds.  The first is the Cold War veteran, Anatoly Nikitin Schmidt, a man of mixed backgrounds and loyalties.  Whether he is a double or triple agent is difficult to tell.  He moves with ease between his Soviet handler, Borya and his American handler, Cliff, Sr.The novel's sometimes narrator, Karl Heinz, forms a second pole.  Pill and alcohol dependent, it is in this Italian-German we see the damage that has been done to the children of the Cold War warriors. "What worthwhile causes exists for my generation?" he laments. "The era of great ideologies is over.   For us, heroic causes are foreign ones." Betrayal and duplicity are two of the novel's major themes.  Nikitin wears a pair of cufflinks that display the ultimate symbol of duplicity, the Trojan Horse.  His handler Borya, fascinated with Greek mythology and especially, Helen of Troy, tells him: "For the Gods, the big betrayal is betrayal of what you love.  The greatest freedom is the freedom to betray." Borya sees in Helen a metaphor for the Cold War in which blood was spilt for an "impalpable ghost," namely the specter of Communist world domination.  No such conspiracy existed. Stalin followed the traditional Czarist foreign policy of maintaining a protective buffer zone around Russia. Like the Greeks storming the walls of Troy, the early Cold War warriors felt the existence of an evil enemy and considered themselves lucky to be in the forefront against it.But like all chimeras, the Cold War evaporated and its warriors were left with a void in their lives. Nikitin observes that the spy is the eternal child.  He lives his life as a fairy tale.  So when one fairy tale dies, another must be found if the spy is to feel whole.   For Nikitin, the replacement is the belief that victims and terrorists are locked in a symbiotic embrace. "When I stop and consider who benefits from terrorism, the list grows longer and longer. The police need terrorism to justify the government's hard line, the unending crisis, the wars, the special laws. In the name of the war on terrorism they can do anything they want."Nikitin goes in pursuit of the one individual or group he believes is the mastermind behind all terrorist activity. Nikitin wishes to impose a linear order on the sloppy mess that is terrorism with all of its unpredictability.  This struggle forces Nikitin into a gray world of amorality.  He acts as if nothing is absolutely good or absolutely evil. Morality slips away when it tries to impose a linear order on the chaotic fecundity of his life. The main drama of The Trojan Spy lies in the hopelessness of the struggle of the single man who hopes to strike at the heart of a bloodless system of power that in fact has no heart. The driving force of this novel is the conflict between what one thinks and what one does. Nikitin investigates the line of false flag operations, state terrorism, the colour alerts and warnings of imminent terrorist attacks. And suffers for daring the gods.

The Trojan Spy

Genre Fiction

Punto Press, LLC

Italy. Mexico. Russia. Gaither Stewart has lived them all. That's what makes ICY CURRENT, COMPULSIVE COURSE a rare collection of short stories from a gifted author.

Travel

BookSurge Publishing

<p>The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist…. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. (Walter Benjamin, Theses of the Philosophy of History, IV.)</p>

TRAILS OF MEMORY

Poetry

Cyberwit.net

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

Books by Stewart, Gaither

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

To Be a Stranger

To Be a Stranger

Icy Current, Compulsive Course: Selected Stories

Once in Berlin

The Trojan Spy

Icy Current, Compulsive Course: Selected Stories

TRAILS OF MEMORY