There's a certain sentimentality to the ending, particularly the final paragraph, but the story overall is rich enough that it's hardly a fatal flaw. Stambolian allows this historical context to be clear without it becoming like bad historical fiction or Forrest Gump, where Famous Names and Moments of History overwhelm the ordinary, everyday experience of living through history. The father in the story escaped the Armenian genocide and survived the Great Depression and World War II.
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Stambolian's own story "In My Father's Car" is quite strong, a father/son story that benefits from a sense of historical depth, of characters with full lives. It led me immediately to seek out a copy of the novel it comes from, Native, though I haven't yet had a chance to read it.
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Unlike in previous volumes, one of the best pieces here is a novel excerpt: Henderson's "Myths", a beautifully ethereal and affecting text, one that for the first time in the series offers a Native American point of view. Nonetheless, there are some stories that ought to be highlighted from this book: (It is a problem that continues to this day.) They are stories by writers who seem to think that "short story" is synonymous with "minor, trivial".Īnd while I don't blame the writers or the editor for the social and cultural forces that shaped this book, I do blame them a bit for not believing in the short story as a worthy artform of its own. With some exceptions, these are not stories that push themselves very far. In fact, I think it's the formal blandness that is the real failure in these stories. Unfortunately, the quest for respectability led to a quietism of both content and form. There is great benefit to having such books in the local mall's Waldenbooks - I know from my own experience how important it was to be able to find books with "gay" in their title available outside of big cities. This was a book that you might, if you were lucky, find on the shelves of your local mall's Waldenbooks.
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Another world was possible!) This was a book released by one of the major publishers of the era, and it had a softly pastel cover depicting two utterly unthreatening, inoffensive middle-class white guys. (Note, for example, that Conjunctions at this time was publishing Gary Indiana and Kathy Acker in a celebration of "The New Gothic". Thus, Stambolian kept himself away from two vital alternative sources of prose not subject to the hegemony of Best American Short Story/Iowa Writers Workshop-style writing of the day. The book's desire for respectability is clear from the limitations of its tent size - Stambolian not only began to distance himself from avant-garde writers after the first volume, but he also did not seek out genre fiction, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s was particularly reviled by the gatekeepers of the literary establishment. Yet there were real borders on what he would include. Stambolian wanted to create a moderately big tent in this book, which prevents it from making much of an aesthetic statement: he wanted to show that gay male writers could write in a variety of styles and for a variety of purposes, but that led to the books becoming grab-bags. Men on Men 3 is a book that feels like it is working much too hard to be respectable. Along with "inert", my notes say things like "a pleasant little story", "unremarkable", "spends too much time on things that don't need it and not enough time on what is most compelling", "a slight story", "a touch too undefined", "a rambling memoir-style story", "slight story", "stagey and overlong", "meandering memoir-like story". Men on Men 3 feels very much like a book suffocating under the long shadow of the 1980s minimalists of literary fiction who became the darlings of MFA programs, and who, despite the excellent qualities of a lot of the most prominent stories, unfortunately inspired a narrowing of possibility for many acolytes' writing.
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I'm not sure it's sex per se that the book needs more of, but rather the energy of writers like Glück and Cooper - writers who see writing as more than the creation of epiphanies. Men on Men 3 suffers from the absence of authors like Robert Glück and Dennis Cooper (from the original Men on Men), who, without subscribing to the very limited mythology of gay male porn, manage explicitly both to acknowledge and to challenge their readers' experience of desire. Not that there isn't food for fantasy here, but where it exists, it is presented in a way that seems almost furtive and apologetic. It seems to me that as the Men on Men series has 'evolved,' the number of turn-ons per page has decreased dramatically from volume to volume.