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In Constant Flight
Softcover, looks NEW, unread, a fine and clean copy. Spine is not creased.
- GenresShort Stories
176 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1983
63 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Tallent
28 books72 followersElizabeth Tallent's short stories have been published in literary magazines and journals such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Threepenny Review, and North American Review, and her stories have been reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections.
She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of California, Davis. She has been a faculty member at Stanford University since 1994.
She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of California, Davis. She has been a faculty member at Stanford University since 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 8, 2012
"Keats" and "Asteroids" are knockouts.
November 29, 2018
(Reread.)
A perfect collection of stories by the criminally undersung Elizabeth Tallent, one of the very finest practitioners of the form. So many of the stories here are permanent ones for me: "Ice," "Natural Law," "Why I Love Country Music," "Swans." I can — I will — reread them until I die.
And let me add: no one does endings better than Elizabeth Tallent. Whether it's the ending of "Ice," wherein the narrator, while skating in the arms of a man in a bear costume, begins to weep, and is delivered the story's last line (from the bear): "You know, don't you, that you are not yourself?" or the close of "Why I Love Country Music," as the narrator opens up a box of dirt her lover has mailed her, or the pitch-perfect final page of the title story, which feature the narrator and her ex-husband playing a game of fox-and-goose on a campus quad — "I walk slowly to the perimeter of the outer circle. I will be the goose, he the fox. The tamped snow squeaks beneath my boots. He faces me from the very center of the circle, where the lines intersect. He claps his hands together to warm them; even in the darkness I can tell that he never takes his eyes from my face. He has to run on the lines. Those are the rules." — no one leaves a story quite like Tallent does. Her endings should be studied.
Some other favorite moments from the collection:
“Before the funeral, my mother daubed Chanel behind my grandmother’s ears. Her head was posed oddly on the pillow, her neck craned into a rigid, chin-upward position, the way someone will suddenly stare if you say, ‘Look, sky-writing!” - “Ice”
"“In South Africa the men dig hunched over — it is ‘uneconomic,’ in the words of the mining companies, to dig away enough earth for the men to stand upright, the traditional vertical posture of Homo sapiens, but not, it seems, of miners. So the miners of diamonds remain for years in their position of enforced reverence, on their knees. The depths of the earth are open to them, the glinting, ancient lights buried within are retrieved and sold, only to end upon the fingers of virgins in fraternity house basements.” - “Why I Love Country Music”
"“Much later, with this same insistence on making distinctions, she had asked, ‘Doesn’t it scare you, falling in love with someone who’s married?’ ‘No,’ he had said, and then had been forced two wonder whether or not that was true. What did scare him, what had scared him even before they became lovers, was the haphazardness of their first meeting — the fact that, if she had not arrived that September with the back seat of her Volkswagen piled high with sweaters and ski poles and books, there was nothing in the texture of the universe that could have guaranteed their connection. It was an accident and accidents were nothing to base your life on. He understood how much he had come to rely on empiricism, the way that the physical world offered so tirelessly to repeat itself — the way that water, whenever it froze, made ice." - "Swans"
“The night he observed the hidden moon — it was gone in the blink of an eye, he said, but he had seen it, it was fitful and clear as a firefly — the janitor had poured champagne over Gregory’s head until his hair was in his eyes. I licked the champagne from the edges of his mustache when he kissed me. The janitor and I danced a rough approximation of a waltz while Gregory conducted Rachmaninoff. ‘What will you name the moon?’ I asked him over the janitor’s thin shoulder. The janitor held me stiffly, nearly a foot away from his chest. We turned and spun. ‘I don’t know,’ Gregory said. ‘Moons are named by committees now, I think. This committee is now in session. Anyone have any ideas?’ It is still a secret; only the three of us are supposed to know that the moon was named for night janitor.” - “In Constant Flight”
“Three times, Simon has considered cutting the tree down, and each time decided against it, in part because the straight lower branch still holds the two uneven lengths of rope, fraying and always damp, that once held the yellow board on which Michael had spent whole afternoons swinging, his legs lifting and falling loosely. Whenever Simon rests the blade of the ax against the silver bark he seems to hear the double creak of the vanished swing — two notes, one for ascent, one for the downward arc.” - “The Evolution of Birds of Paradise”
A perfect collection of stories by the criminally undersung Elizabeth Tallent, one of the very finest practitioners of the form. So many of the stories here are permanent ones for me: "Ice," "Natural Law," "Why I Love Country Music," "Swans." I can — I will — reread them until I die.
And let me add: no one does endings better than Elizabeth Tallent. Whether it's the ending of "Ice," wherein the narrator, while skating in the arms of a man in a bear costume, begins to weep, and is delivered the story's last line (from the bear): "You know, don't you, that you are not yourself?" or the close of "Why I Love Country Music," as the narrator opens up a box of dirt her lover has mailed her, or the pitch-perfect final page of the title story, which feature the narrator and her ex-husband playing a game of fox-and-goose on a campus quad — "I walk slowly to the perimeter of the outer circle. I will be the goose, he the fox. The tamped snow squeaks beneath my boots. He faces me from the very center of the circle, where the lines intersect. He claps his hands together to warm them; even in the darkness I can tell that he never takes his eyes from my face. He has to run on the lines. Those are the rules." — no one leaves a story quite like Tallent does. Her endings should be studied.
Some other favorite moments from the collection:
“Before the funeral, my mother daubed Chanel behind my grandmother’s ears. Her head was posed oddly on the pillow, her neck craned into a rigid, chin-upward position, the way someone will suddenly stare if you say, ‘Look, sky-writing!” - “Ice”
"“In South Africa the men dig hunched over — it is ‘uneconomic,’ in the words of the mining companies, to dig away enough earth for the men to stand upright, the traditional vertical posture of Homo sapiens, but not, it seems, of miners. So the miners of diamonds remain for years in their position of enforced reverence, on their knees. The depths of the earth are open to them, the glinting, ancient lights buried within are retrieved and sold, only to end upon the fingers of virgins in fraternity house basements.” - “Why I Love Country Music”
"“Much later, with this same insistence on making distinctions, she had asked, ‘Doesn’t it scare you, falling in love with someone who’s married?’ ‘No,’ he had said, and then had been forced two wonder whether or not that was true. What did scare him, what had scared him even before they became lovers, was the haphazardness of their first meeting — the fact that, if she had not arrived that September with the back seat of her Volkswagen piled high with sweaters and ski poles and books, there was nothing in the texture of the universe that could have guaranteed their connection. It was an accident and accidents were nothing to base your life on. He understood how much he had come to rely on empiricism, the way that the physical world offered so tirelessly to repeat itself — the way that water, whenever it froze, made ice." - "Swans"
“The night he observed the hidden moon — it was gone in the blink of an eye, he said, but he had seen it, it was fitful and clear as a firefly — the janitor had poured champagne over Gregory’s head until his hair was in his eyes. I licked the champagne from the edges of his mustache when he kissed me. The janitor and I danced a rough approximation of a waltz while Gregory conducted Rachmaninoff. ‘What will you name the moon?’ I asked him over the janitor’s thin shoulder. The janitor held me stiffly, nearly a foot away from his chest. We turned and spun. ‘I don’t know,’ Gregory said. ‘Moons are named by committees now, I think. This committee is now in session. Anyone have any ideas?’ It is still a secret; only the three of us are supposed to know that the moon was named for night janitor.” - “In Constant Flight”
“Three times, Simon has considered cutting the tree down, and each time decided against it, in part because the straight lower branch still holds the two uneven lengths of rope, fraying and always damp, that once held the yellow board on which Michael had spent whole afternoons swinging, his legs lifting and falling loosely. Whenever Simon rests the blade of the ax against the silver bark he seems to hear the double creak of the vanished swing — two notes, one for ascent, one for the downward arc.” - “The Evolution of Birds of Paradise”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews