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Sweet Land Stories
by E.L. Doctorow
Five short stories about people all over America struggling to survive.
Random House, 147 pages
05/04/2004
$22.95
ISBN: 1400062047
Fiction
Short Stories
NOTES:
Two of the stories have already won awards after being previously published by periodicals.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Houston Chronicle Eric Miles Williamson
[Doctorow's] new collection, Sweet Land Stories, shows he is not only our master of the novel but also author-exemplar of the trickier form of the short story.
Kirkus Reviews
A riveting collection of five tightly plotted long stories on a favorite Doctorow theme: the tension between American institutions and the criminal elements that undermine them.
Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
There's far more subtlety and insight packed into any one of these pieces than one finds in many full-blown novels. [1 March 2004, p. 110]
Booklist Donna Seaman
At base, what Doctorow's unique and electrifying stories grapple with is our longing to trust authority and our realization that, instead, we must always question it. [15 Feb. 2004, p. 1003]
Publishers Weekly
In this knowing treatment of the cynical abuse of power, Doctorow uses the spare, laconic style endemic to thrillers and builds suspense with sure strokes.
The Nation David L. Ulin
Sweet Land Stories is Doctorow's most overtly American work since Billy Bathgate, a state reflected by its title, which may or may not be intended as irony.
Boston Globe David Thoreen
This is not your father's realism. The machinery whirs from time to time. There are tics amid the talk. And these effects are intentional, left by a craftsman worried lest we mistake the artifact for life itself, ideology for nature. [9 May 2004, D6]
Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
Gracefully mordant and frequently heart-churning, these stories are worth the steep price of a book that's a mere 147 pages.
Los Angeles Times Heller McAlpin
In the tradition of the best American fiction, "Sweet Land Stories" prods the beached whale of the American dream in order to examine its underbelly. Less complex and tangled than his recent novels, these are deceptively simple but subtle morality tales that showcase Doctorow's deftness as a storyteller. [16 May 2004, R7]
PopMatters Steven M. Deusner
The stories are straightforward only on their plainspoken surfaces, but they conceal a deep network of ideas that build on each other as the collection progresses.
Washington Post Kevin Baker
It is a slim volume, only five stories -- yet it shows as well as anything Doctorow has ever written that our present and our supposedly long-buried past are really quite interchangeable. [20 June 2004, T06]
The New York Times Book Review Lee Siegel
Each of these five stories depicts a dark social or psychological atmosphere, a little world of hateful actions produced by hateful conditions. But the stories are told in a spirit of sweet affirmation, as if they were meant as signs pointing readers to shocking or daring destinations that the author did not have the harshness -- ''the power to do harm'' -- to reach himself.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Several of E. L. Doctorow's novels -- ''Ragtime,'' ''Welcome to Hard Times,'' ''The Book of Daniel'' and ''Billy Bathgate'' -- have been turned into plodding, overproduced movies. Here, in his latest collection of short fiction, ''Sweet Land Stories,'' he seems to be trying to turn old movie ideas into stories with equally little success at recycling. [11 May 2004, Sec. E1, pg. 7]
 The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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