Now You See It . . .; Stories... | Buy

It's pretty much a straight shot from the upstate New York towns of Richard Russo's books to Bathsheba Monk's Cokesville, PA. This is coal and steel country. The sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheckand two inches means a fat one. And what's the best make-out spot in town? Next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen beguiling, linked stories, spanning fourty-five years, Monk brings a corner of America alive as never before. Her world bursts with indelible characters: Mrs. Szilborski, who bakes great cake, but sprays her neighbors' dogs with mace; and Mrs. Wojic, who believes her husband was reincarnatedas one of those dogs. Then there is the younger generation: Annie Kusiak , who wants to write, and Theresa Gojuk, who dreams of stardom. Cokesville is their Yoknapatawpha; they ache to escape it and the ghosts of their ancestors and the regret of their parents. What ghostsand what regrets! When Theresa's father Bruno falls into a vat of molten steel, the mill gives the family an ingot roughly his weight to bury. As deliciously wry as Allegra Goodman in The Family Markowitz, and with the matter-of-fact humanity of Grace Paley, Bathsheba Monk leads us into a world that is at once totally surprising and recognizable. These stories glow like molten steel.

Bathsheba Monk was born to a family of Pennsylvania coal miners. After being discharged from the Army, she lived in Europe. She recently settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania where she is writing her second book.

Small fry	p. 3
Hocus-pocus	p. 9
Flying lesson	p. 18
Slam book	p. 31
Congratulations, Goldie Katowitz	p. 42
Little yellow dogs	p. 63
Annie Kusiak's meaning of life	p. 71
Now you see it	p. 90
Mrs. Szewczak and the rescue dog	p. 106
Do not revive	p. 120
Last call	p. 134
Mrs. Herbinko's birthday party	p. 157
The great wall	p. 164
Writing lesson	p. 170
Pieces of paper	p. 180
Now you don't	p. 194
Epilogue : excellent sperm	p. 202
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

Excerpted from Now You See It…by Bathsheba Monk. Copyright © 2006 by Bathsheba Monk. Published in June 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Small Fry
_________

1980

After Sam Bledsoe divorced me, I decided to cut my ties with Boston, where I had lived for ten years, and move to Los Angeles. I stayed with Theresa Gojuk, or “Tess Randall,” as she was known in the business. I was trying to break into screenwriting, and she was trying to break out of an alcohol and pill habit. We’d been friends since high school, the type of friends who could drop in on each other without any notice. So I did.

“You want my advice, Annie?” she asked, even though I hadn’t asked her. “You want my advice? Go back home. It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than, well, the other way around. You know.”

She reached for a glass, but the counter was empty. There was no booze in the house, she said. She kept apologizing for that, even though I told her I didn’t drink much anymore, either.

“Still,” she said, “I should keep some for company.”

She looked around the bar by the pool where we were sitting. Her fingers tapped the stool, then the counter again. I got the feeling she didn’t want to be here, that she didn’t want to be anywhere, because she didn’t even want to be in her own skin.

Since I’d last seen her at her father’s funeral, Theresa had divorced Jason, her sometime co-star, and married a lawyer named Phil. “I need a lawyer, let me tell you,” she had said on the phone when I told her I might be coming to L.A. “Lawyers are God in this town.” The next time I spoke with her, a month later, she’d said, “You’d think if I married a goddamned lawyer, I’d get some free legal advice, right? No! The bastard charged me! He charged me!”

By the time I made it out to the coast, she’d divorced Phil. Her only male companion seemed to be an illegal El Salvadoran, William, who cleaned her pool and who, as far as I could tell, didn’t speak any English. She was so desperate for cash she’d taken a job as hostess on Alien Visitation, a show that highlighted videotapes of aliens that viewers had recorded.

“Every creep in America has a camcorder,” she told me. “They’re skulking around the bushes at night, recording God knows what, and they just happen to see aliens. So what the hell, right? Turn the camera on them. Most of them have sex with the aliens, too.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“This is Los Angeles,” she said. “Look around! Alien spawn is the most logical explanation I can think of.”

William came out to the pool with drinks on a tray. I sipped mine and felt a tang. It had tequila in it. William winked at me and offered one to Theresa. Soon Theresa stopped giving me advice I wasn’t going to take and we started having fun. Like old times.

“If Cokesville’s such a hot town,” I asked, “and I should go back, why don’t you go back?”

“Didn’t they bulldoze that fucking place?”

She moved the beach umbrella so her face was in the shade. No one wanted to look at a wrinkled face on television, even if it was only introducing aliens. William, bored with bringing trays of drinks, set a giant pitcher of margaritas between us.

“The furnaces are shut down,” I said.

Theresa squinted into her drink. “Bastards,” she said. Her father, Bruno, had fallen into a vat of steel four years ago, but the company had refused to compensate the Gojuk family for his death, saying he’d committed suicide. They claimed to have witnesses who saw him jump, actually take a dive into the pot of molten steel. By the time Theresa sent her lawyer husband to see what he could do, Cokesville Steel had shed its last seven thousand employees and had been bought and sold so many times there was nobody to sue. It was as if the three-hundred-acre plant had never existed. Now you see it. Poof. Now you don’t.

Excerpted from Now You See It...: Stories from Cokesville, PA by Bathsheba Monk
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.