{"product_id":"mother-of-sorrows-isbn-9781400096213","title":"Mother of Sorrows","description":"In these ten interwoven stories,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003etwo adolescent brothers face a world in which their father has suddenly died, a world dominated by their beautiful and complicated mother. Thirty years later, one of the brothers–the only remaining survivor of a family he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever–narrates these precise and heartbreaking tales. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language,\u003ci\u003e Mother of Sorrows \u003c\/i\u003eintroduces us to an elegant writer like no other in contemporary fiction.“\u003ci\u003eMother of Sorrows\u003c\/i\u003e is almost unbearably beautiful. It is, purely and simply, the real thing — a work of fiction so intricately felt, so magnificently written, that it can stand unembarrassed beside the mystery of life itself.”–Michael Cunningham, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Hours\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Some of the cleanest, most elegant and unfussy prose I’ve read in ages. . . . [It] is, on one level, a gay coming-of-age narrative, and as such it ranks among the best. . . . But the ruling metaphors here are more universal: concealment and disclosure, assertion and invisibility.” –James Marcus, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The voice in McCann’s \u003ci\u003eMother of Sorrows \u003c\/i\u003eis purely his own — lyrical, melancholy, precise, refined.” –\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“McCann holds such an exquisitely bright light over the landscape of 1950s suburban Maryland and the coming of age of his emotionally fragile, unnamed protagonist who appears in each interlocking story that the resulting book feels almost combustible. . . [His] prose is full of achingly sensual detail and imagery.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003eRichard McCann’s work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic Monthly\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eTin House\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003ePloughshares\u003c\/i\u003e, and in many anthologies, including \u003ci\u003eBest American Essays 2000\u003c\/i\u003e. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eGhost Letters\u003c\/i\u003e, a book of poems. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the graduate program in creative writing at American University.Crêpe de Chine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach night, after dinner, my father went downstairs to his workbench to build birdhouses, which he fashioned from scraps of wood left over from pine-paneling our basement. He was a connoisseur of birdhouses, my mother said. His  favorite was a miniature replica of our ranch house, with  a tiny Plexiglas picture window, a red Dutch door, and a shingled roof. It was a labor of love, he said the night he  completed it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy brother, Davis, went to his room, where he listened to Radio Moscow on his shortwave. As for me: I cleared the table.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend we’re sitting this dance out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe sat at the table as if she were waiting to be photographed, holding her cigarette aloft. “Have I told you the story of my teapot?” she asked, lifting a Limoges pot from the table. She had been given the teapot by her mother, whom we called Dear—Dear One, Dear Me, Dearest of Us All. Dear had just recently entered a sanatorium for depression, after having given away some of her most cherished possessions. When she died at home a few months later—she’d returned to her deteriorated Brooklyn brownstone, where she slept on a roll-away bed in the basement—my mother found she’d left an unwitnessed will written entirely in rhymed couplets: “I spent as I went \/ Seeking love and content,” it began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No,” I told my mother as I examined the teapot’s gold-rimmed lid, “you haven’t told me about it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn fact, by then my mother had already told me about  almost everything. But I wanted to hear everything again. What else in Carroll Knolls—our sunstruck subdivision of identical brick houses—could possibly have competed with the stories my mother would summon from her china or her incomplete sterling tea service or the violet Louis Sherry candy box where she kept her dried corsages? I wanted to live within the lull of her voice, soft and regretful, as she resuscitated the long-ago nights of her girlhood, those nights she waited for her parents to come home in taxicabs from parties, those nights they still lived in the largest house on Carroll Street, those nights before her parents’ divorce, before her father started his drinking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe whispered magic word: crêpe de chine, Sherry Netherlands, Havilland, Stork Club, argent repousée . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNight after night she told me her stories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNight after night I watched her smoke her endless Parliaments, stubbing out the lipstick-stained butts in a crystal ashtray. We sat at the half-cleared table like two deposed aristocrats for whom any word might serve as the switch of a minuterie that briefly lights a long corridor of memory—so long, in fact, the switch must be pressed repeatedly before they arrive at the door to their room.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said her mother had once danced with the Prince of Wales.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said her father had shaken hands with FDR and Al Capone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said she herself had once looked exactly like Merle Oberon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo prove it, she showed me photos of herself taken during her first marriage, when she was barely twenty. From every photo she’d torn her ex-husband’s image, so that in most of them she was standing next to a jagged edge, and in some of them a part of her body—where he’d had his hand on her arm, perhaps—was torn away also.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said life was fifty-fifty with happiness and heartache.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said that when she was a girl she’d kept a diary in which she’d recorded the plots of her favorite movies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe said that if I was lucky I too would inherit the gift  of gab.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was little, she read me Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, nobody. Goodnight, mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut otherwise, she read me no bedtime books. She told me no fairy tales.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInstead she came to my room at night to tell me stories that began like these: Once upon a time, I had a gold brush and comb set. Once upon a time, my parents looked like  F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Once upon a time, I rode  a pony in Central Park. Once upon a time, I had a silver  fox coat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThings she told me, sitting on the edge of my bed at night:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I was born with a caul. That means I have a sixth sense.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr, touching her perfumed wrist to my cheek: “This is called ‘Shalimar.’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr, faintly humming: “Do you know this tune? Do you know ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream, I’ll Have You to  Remember’?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr sometimes when she coughed—her “nervous cough,” her “smoker’s cough”—she said, “One day, after I’m gone, you’ll hear a woman cough like this, and you’ll think she  is me.”Stories","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301231939813,"sku":"NP9781400096213","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400096213.jpg?v=1767733001","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/mother-of-sorrows-isbn-9781400096213","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}