The Best Seats in the House: And Other Stories

By Keith Lee Morris

The men who inhabit these stories live in precarious normalcy, balancing dashed dreams with an uncertain progress into maturity, small-town realities with their largely unfulfilled hopes. It is due to Keith Morris' remarkable gift to give such eloquent voices to his characters that we cherish them and believe completely in the bewildering complexities that lie just beneath the placid surface of their yearning, workday lives. In these stories, a failed high-school athlete watches as his gifted son falls under the spell of his charismatic grandfather, and a young man in the process of losing his sight struggles to accept his developing blindness while clinging to his diminishing independence. Morris explores the painful tensions of parental love and "old-fashioned" virtues like respect, thoughtfulness, empathy, and understanding. Morris is a writer of enormous skill, and these stories of small-town men groping for a perspective on themselves and the lives they've come to live are among the most powerful in contemporary fiction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874175941
• ISBN13: 9780874175943
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

RESOUNDING PSYCHOLOGICAL DEPTH IN THIS GREAT BOOK!

Read this book! One of the best short story collections published in a decade. There is not a single weak link in THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE. It is rare to accomplish in one story what Morris achieves in every story here. There is resounding psychological depth in his depictions of characters who have held off their deepest feelings for too long and are, at last, overtaken by them. Each passage is surprisingly, quietly moving, whether the story is about lost love ("Losing Julia Finch"), or about the disappearance of a life plan and the appearance of another ("Objects Past the Shoreline" and "The Children of Dead State Troopers"), or about the raptures and unbearable pressures of family ("The Best Seats in the House" and "Astronauts").