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Midair
Fine in fine dust jacket. Hardcover first edition - New Dutton - Seymour Lawrence, , (1985.). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in fine dust jacket.. First printing. His first collection of short stories (second book) with praise on the back cover from such writers as Robert Stone, Tobias Wolff and many others.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
149 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 1985
2 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
Frank Conroy
19 books78 followersFrank Conroy was an American author, born in New York, New York to an American father and a Danish mother. He published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time, published in 1967, which ultimately made Conroy a noted figure in the literary world. The book was nominated for the National Book Award.
Conroy graduated from Haverford College, and was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005, where he was also F. Wendell Miller Professor. He was previously the director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982–1987.
Conroy's published works included: the moving memoir Stop-Time; a collection of short stories, Midair; a novel, Body and Soul, which is regarded as one of the finest evocations of the experience of being a musician; a collection of essays and commentaries, Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now; and a travelogue, Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper's Magazine and Partisan Review. He was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.
In addition to writing, Conroy was an accomplished jazz pianist, winning a Grammy Award in 1986. His book Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now includes articles that describe jamming with Charles Mingus and with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. The latter session occurred when Conroy was writing about the Rolling Stones for Esquire. Conroy had arrived at a mansion for the interview, found nobody there, and eventually sat down at a grand piano and began to play. Someone wandered in, sat down at the drums, and joined in with accomplished jazz drumming; then a fine jazz bassist joined in. They turned out to be Watts and Wyman, whom Conroy did not recognize until they introduced themselves after the session.
Conroy died of colon cancer on April 6, 2005, in Iowa City, Iowa, at the age of 69.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Co...
Conroy graduated from Haverford College, and was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005, where he was also F. Wendell Miller Professor. He was previously the director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1982–1987.
Conroy's published works included: the moving memoir Stop-Time; a collection of short stories, Midair; a novel, Body and Soul, which is regarded as one of the finest evocations of the experience of being a musician; a collection of essays and commentaries, Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now; and a travelogue, Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket. His fiction and non-fiction appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper's Magazine and Partisan Review. He was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.
In addition to writing, Conroy was an accomplished jazz pianist, winning a Grammy Award in 1986. His book Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now includes articles that describe jamming with Charles Mingus and with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. The latter session occurred when Conroy was writing about the Rolling Stones for Esquire. Conroy had arrived at a mansion for the interview, found nobody there, and eventually sat down at a grand piano and began to play. Someone wandered in, sat down at the drums, and joined in with accomplished jazz drumming; then a fine jazz bassist joined in. They turned out to be Watts and Wyman, whom Conroy did not recognize until they introduced themselves after the session.
Conroy died of colon cancer on April 6, 2005, in Iowa City, Iowa, at the age of 69.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Co...
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 5, 2016
I became infatuated with Frank Conroy after reading his marvelous 25 page essay on Steve McQueen for Esquire magazine, an essay he later disowned. Intrigued I read his memoir Stop Time and found it ordinary - wordy without conveying intensity or showing why his life was unusual and worth reading about. His novel Body and Soul felt overextended, sentimental and slack, and the attacks on Schoenberg seemed simpleminded. I loved Midair, but rereading the collection discovered that the story I once found weakest - Car Games - I now found strongest. Car Games captures masculinity's scary unpredictability and has a sensuous attentiveness to the beauty of automobiles and driving through snow and unleashing anger without knowing or caring where it comes from. The narrator doesn't know himself or why he is unhappy - it just happens, and the mystery at his core, because unexplored, feels real. This same quality is flashed in the racquetball game (37-39) in Celestial Events. Conroy is at his best with masculine ritual and unfocused, mysterious anger, which is threatening because we know not its source.
However, these stories mostly deal with more ordinary emotions and events and with older people. Midair suffers from a lack of charisma; it feels old. The hole left by the departure of youthful swagger isn't filled in with the insights of maturity. The prose I once found tough and clean now seems flat and plain. As the leader of the Iowa Workshop Mr. Conroy edited fiercely, but the stories here are NOT honed to the bone and they lack Ernest (a writer Conroy may have disliked) Hemingway's poetic flair. In retrospect I believe what attracted me to his profile of my favorite actor was the fact that Conroy is very cool and very male and leaves a lot unexplained yet hinted at. You feel like he and McQueen recognize each other's special brand of cool and thus an unspoken bond is created between them. You want to hang out with them too, to be admitted into their privileged circle, to win their approval and be deemed cool.
Here that uncanny magic only occurs in moments where he delves into masculine ritual: Car Games, the racquetball game, the violent movie in Gossip (111-113, the basketball game that climaxes the collection. Everything else is observed truthfully and accurately, but without enough detail, in prose so flat (page 107 indicates he mistrusts metaphors and romanticism), so undifferentiated and almost anti-intellectual, it could come from Time magazine. Without digging beneath the surface to illuminate the infinite aspects of each experience, we recognize the accuracy without feeling anything. The second best story here is Gossip but its ending hints at profundity without revealing anything profound. Transit features the type of line that recurs throughout the collection and reveals its main problem: "The scenes below were hinting at something, as if some great principle was about to be revealed." It never is.
However, these stories mostly deal with more ordinary emotions and events and with older people. Midair suffers from a lack of charisma; it feels old. The hole left by the departure of youthful swagger isn't filled in with the insights of maturity. The prose I once found tough and clean now seems flat and plain. As the leader of the Iowa Workshop Mr. Conroy edited fiercely, but the stories here are NOT honed to the bone and they lack Ernest (a writer Conroy may have disliked) Hemingway's poetic flair. In retrospect I believe what attracted me to his profile of my favorite actor was the fact that Conroy is very cool and very male and leaves a lot unexplained yet hinted at. You feel like he and McQueen recognize each other's special brand of cool and thus an unspoken bond is created between them. You want to hang out with them too, to be admitted into their privileged circle, to win their approval and be deemed cool.
Here that uncanny magic only occurs in moments where he delves into masculine ritual: Car Games, the racquetball game, the violent movie in Gossip (111-113, the basketball game that climaxes the collection. Everything else is observed truthfully and accurately, but without enough detail, in prose so flat (page 107 indicates he mistrusts metaphors and romanticism), so undifferentiated and almost anti-intellectual, it could come from Time magazine. Without digging beneath the surface to illuminate the infinite aspects of each experience, we recognize the accuracy without feeling anything. The second best story here is Gossip but its ending hints at profundity without revealing anything profound. Transit features the type of line that recurs throughout the collection and reveals its main problem: "The scenes below were hinting at something, as if some great principle was about to be revealed." It never is.
January 25, 2012
A collection of eight stories ranging between brilliant and okay. Each story (and the author's novel Body & Soul) are or brush with nostalgia.
Midair The story that made me want to read Conroy who conveys so much with so little. This is one of the best short stories I've ever read. About a man who, as a child, was held outside the window, several floors up by his desperate, insane father.
Celestial Events Also brilliant. About a man dealing with the death of his mother. I liked this nearly as much as the first one.
Car Games This was different, angrier. I appreciated that it was different and liked the honesty of the ending.
The Mysterious Case of R Written in a letter format I didn't care for. Found it emotionally detached. This was one of the "okay" stories.
Roses A man over a flower shop sleeps with different women. I didn't get why he included this one. It seemed unfinished to me. Also uninteresting.
Transit Also in letter format; this was haunting. Very different than the others. A man witnesses an odd event at a subway station.
Gossip Less emotional than most of the others. Less interesting as well.
The Sense of the Meeting Changing of the guard between father and son and lost youth. Not brilliant as the first two offerings, but good. Emotional.
Midair The story that made me want to read Conroy who conveys so much with so little. This is one of the best short stories I've ever read. About a man who, as a child, was held outside the window, several floors up by his desperate, insane father.
Celestial Events Also brilliant. About a man dealing with the death of his mother. I liked this nearly as much as the first one.
Car Games This was different, angrier. I appreciated that it was different and liked the honesty of the ending.
The Mysterious Case of R Written in a letter format I didn't care for. Found it emotionally detached. This was one of the "okay" stories.
Roses A man over a flower shop sleeps with different women. I didn't get why he included this one. It seemed unfinished to me. Also uninteresting.
Transit Also in letter format; this was haunting. Very different than the others. A man witnesses an odd event at a subway station.
Gossip Less emotional than most of the others. Less interesting as well.
The Sense of the Meeting Changing of the guard between father and son and lost youth. Not brilliant as the first two offerings, but good. Emotional.
November 29, 2008
Midair is a collection of eight short stories by Frank Conroy (Stop-Time) that opens with a tour-de-force, the title story "Midair," and proceeds in fits and starts thereafter. Some sentences and perceptions in this collection are breathtaking, some sentences and perceptions are more or less narrative filler. The fundamental ethos of Conroy's writing--when I say this I include Stop-Time--seems to be the contradiction between nostaligic, youthful idealism (how things ought to be in a reasonably decent world) and mature disenchantment (how things play out in middle age. This sets up a number of piquant contrasts that puzzle, disappoint, and occasionally uplift Conroy's typical male protagonists, but this is a pretty thin collection of tales, with a few real clunkers (The Car Game, Transit, The Mysterious Case of R).
The strength of the story "Midair" is its effortless combination--almost novelistic in scope--of narrative sequences that trace the experience of a boy to a man to a father. Conroy has a wonderful way of asserting fresh scenes, with no expository "continuity," that pinpoint crucial moments in his protagonist's development (moral and psychological, but primarily moral.)
But one great story doesn't justify an entire collection.
The strength of the story "Midair" is its effortless combination--almost novelistic in scope--of narrative sequences that trace the experience of a boy to a man to a father. Conroy has a wonderful way of asserting fresh scenes, with no expository "continuity," that pinpoint crucial moments in his protagonist's development (moral and psychological, but primarily moral.)
But one great story doesn't justify an entire collection.
March 28, 2014
The first story, the title story of the collection, is excellent. Well-written, moving, surprising and, oddly enough, messy in all the right ways. I'd give the book as a whole five stars, except four of the stories in the collection are only good, not great. The other four are masterpieces and make this one worth picking up if you like literary fiction.
February 26, 2018
Solid, easy read. Conroy, the Writing School professor is in his wheelhouse when writing about writing professors and their whimsies, betrayals, temptations. There are some other gems here but Gossip is a top notch piece and The Sense of the Meeting a tearjerker for me.
February 16, 2019
Heartfelt, interspersed with a couple of mysterious or shocking moments. A good change for me, as I’ve read mostly short stories by women about women. The bookends, “Midair” and “The Sense of the Meeting,” were my favorites.
September 1, 2019
His writing is just, something else. I can't say I enjoyed EVERY story in here, but many of them had me transfixed. The clarity of his storytelling and the surgical precision with which he gets to our most relatable human moments- it really inspires me.
January 12, 2026
- 3.5 Stars
Loved Stop-Time, and so I'm here. With short stories, you have to prove so much on so few pages that I inevitably end up admiring those that excel at the task. Midair and Gossip (Celestial Events and The Sense of the Meeting coming close) were, imo, able to do just that. I didn't much like the others, so I'm quite unsure what I'm meant to do with my rating when it's such a mixed bag of 5, 4, 3, and even 2 stars (really, really didn't enjoy 'Roses').
Loved Stop-Time, and so I'm here. With short stories, you have to prove so much on so few pages that I inevitably end up admiring those that excel at the task. Midair and Gossip (Celestial Events and The Sense of the Meeting coming close) were, imo, able to do just that. I didn't much like the others, so I'm quite unsure what I'm meant to do with my rating when it's such a mixed bag of 5, 4, 3, and even 2 stars (really, really didn't enjoy 'Roses').
June 7, 2018
Some good stories
March 3, 2019
I never really know how to rate collections of short stories. Inevitably I love some of the stories but not others, so I lamely split the difference and default to a 3 star rating.
February 17, 2022
The protagonist in every story was variations of the same person, and some barely kept my attention on the page.
November 16, 2023
The style is a little dated, very internal. Crisp writing but I couldn’t bring myself to care about many of the characters.
Favorite stories: Midair, Gossip
Favorite stories: Midair, Gossip
May 11, 2008
"Celestial Events” is one of my all-time favorite stories. I love the way he uses the racquetball game to show the emotional state of the character. “Midair” is the most well-known and anthologized story from this collection, and it has those great contrasting scenes on the balcony and elevator, although it has always seemed to me a weakness of the story that the sister, who is so prominent at the beginning of the story is absent at the end (unless that is just supposed to be another symbol of loss?). With “Gossip” I love the way the gossip theme is mingled with the immaturity/maturity theme. And his wife’s reaction at the end is superb. “The Sense of the Meeting” explores friendship and the father/son relationship using the context of basketball to reveal what’s important. The last lines of dialogue say all that is to be gained or lost.
February 16, 2013
This slim volume was a long time coming - 18 years after his debut, the clear and powerful memoir Stop-Time.
With the exception of the rambling 'Gossip', the remaining tales are excellent. The title story is popular with the anthologies, but the story 'Car Dreams' is my favourite: a potent fable about being careful what you wish for.
The crisp, supple style is enviable too - as is his essay collection Dogs Bark, But The Caravan Rolls On. (His first and only novel, Body & Soul, is a dud, however.)
With the exception of the rambling 'Gossip', the remaining tales are excellent. The title story is popular with the anthologies, but the story 'Car Dreams' is my favourite: a potent fable about being careful what you wish for.
The crisp, supple style is enviable too - as is his essay collection Dogs Bark, But The Caravan Rolls On. (His first and only novel, Body & Soul, is a dud, however.)
July 7, 2007
feels like stories about the children of cheever's characters. some are told to a shrink. there was a year in my early 20s when I couldn't stop reading the story in here called "Roses" which might be a bad hallmark for a story, but more likely for the younger me.
July 10, 2008
Good writers should avoid becoming writer-workshop professors. Stop-Time is much better.
August 24, 2016
gossip is one of the most memorable stories i've ever read.
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November 14, 2010A child's terror a the power of his insane father reverberates as the child becomes a man aand father, finally to escape the ghost with which he has unknowingly been struggling all his life.
April 9, 2012
"Gossip" is in my top three favorite stories of all time. Sadly the rest of the collection is pretty uneven.
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December 29, 2017Good yarns, but not a lot of anything to think about after. Seemed to me a lot of short stories written by a very young person attempting to write short stories for the first time; cute stories but no real meaning.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews