Fling

by John Hersey

Book by Hersey, John

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

John Richard Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, earliest practiced the "new journalism," which fuses storytelling devices of the novel with nonfiction reportage. A 36-member panel under the aegis of journalism department of New York University adjudged account of Hersey of the aftermath of the atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, as the finest piece of journalism of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Rachel]

Hersey's stories come into the world generously endowed with enough substance and style to make us wish they could each last much longer than they do. Though every story is quite different from the others in most respects, reading them together is a seamless experience, with the possible exception of "The Terrorist", which protrudes a bit. (It's a delightful story--a strange adjective, considering the title--but the description of the action as a comic strip is uniquely effective.)

Hersey combines complexity of thought and simplicity of delivery. These are not predictable stories. The outlook is bleak, but the scenery is beautiful.

A sample from the first story, describing a young boy's reaction to a neighbor's sermons:

Dr. Wyman preached a God I couldn’t quite see in my mind, and certainly couldn’t love. I dimly pictured some kind of Grandfather, who dealt out to bad people their awful “just deserts,” which I thought must be poisoned food at the end of delicious meals.

and from the title story, describing a woman selling trinkets at the site of the death in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop:

…she looked like Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, only she was fat and her lake was dust, sand and dust, bones and dust and sand.