Product Description
Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest livingstorytellers," J.F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with EudoraWelty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver as one of the authors whohave given to the short story an unmistakably modern, Americancast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories,published over a period of some thirty years and brought together herein a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things:baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression andthe flight to the suburbs. Powers's greatest subject, however--and onethat was uniquely his--was the life of priests in Chicago and theflatlands of the Midwest. Powers's very human priests, who includedo-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even theodd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a countryunabashedly devoted to consumption.

These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny storiesare an u!nforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that isAmerican life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Thirty stories gathered from three volumes: mid 1940s-70s
I have reviewed on Amazon the earlier collections in their original format, "Prince of Darkness" (1947) and "Presence of Grace," (1956) as well as the novel "Morte d'Urban" (1962). The collected three thin volumes, thirty stories total, are reprinted as "The Stories of J.F. Powers" in 2001 from NY Review Press, as well as reissues of the two novels. As another reviewer on Amazon here noted, I too prefer the original volumes, but the fact that NY Review Press has reprinted the five books (the two novels and this anthology) in handsome editions after Powers (1917-99) languished as a cult favorite and, curse and blessing for him, status as a "writer's writer" who took years to create, it seems, a single story, judging from over forty years and the small shelf of five thin books as originally printed 1947-88.

Denis Donaghue provides an efficient introduction to this rather prickly author, whose moral backbone, no-nonsense manner, and ear for the telling phrase and the revealing pause made him one of America's most talented recorders of fictional priests, laity, and in two great stories a cat as the narrator of Midwestern foibles, dreamers, and ordinary folks, whether in rectories or social halls. His best stories do involve the clergy, as any reader of Powers will recognize, but these at their best emerge more vividly when included among the lesser attempts at themes such as baseball, the space race, race relations, wife-swapping, and a chillingly rendered Welcome Wagon lady.

Powers took his good time writing these stories, so take yours reading them. If you would like more advice on each of the thirty, take a look at my reviews of "Prince," "Presence," and "Look." There, I briefly comment upon each story in the order they were originally printed. This anthology preserves this order, but outside of an introduction adds no new stories to the small but, if you take the best of the clergy stories, memorable tales. As Powers explained why he as a layman wrote about clerics: a man taking out an insurance policy provides no real tension usually. But when a priest takes out an insurance policy, you have material for a story...

Puffed Up Version
Nothing wrong with this version of Powers' stories, but I prefer the original, unabridged "Prince of Darkness and Other Stories" which is available in Doubleday paperback, first published back when Powers was hailed as "a compelling young talent in American fiction, perhaps the most exciting short-story writer to emerge since Eudora Welty."-- Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Doubleday Image Books imprint set about "making the world's finest Catholic literature avilable to all..."True, Mr. Powers' work is formed by his Catholicism, but in subject matter, he writes about baseball and jazz, old people and boys, boxers and more.He has, The New Yorker once observed,"few rivals at creating characters with more than superficial reality."

America's greatest writer
In a world where bestselling authors Joe Queenan, P.J. O'Rourke, Dave Barry, Christopher Buckley, and (God-forgive-me) Al Franken are hailed as leading humorists, there are three giants of American humor that are criminally underappreciated: Florence King, Jim Goad, and the late James Farl Powers. While King and Goad follow in the Rabelasian tradition of the better known humorists listed above, J.F. Powers wrote in a deep and subtle field of allusion and irony. His humor is poignant and instructive in a way that is both profoundly human, yet open to the face of the divine.

The stories collected here also include Powers's tragic pieces, as well as other sketches and thinly disguised passages of his own family life. These are exemplary works, and perhaps the best examples of American writing ever produced, for Powers has often been called "the writer's writer" for the craft and care with which he chooses words.

Attention has been paid to the fact that Powers was a Catholic writer, and there have been critics who strain to invoke comparison with Flannery O'Connor. For me the only points of tangency are that they were Catholics, were writers, wrote about humor and irony, but that is about it. Their voices create entirely different worlds, and their characters are hewn from different rock, and their anima sprouted from different soil.

Powers is a distinctly different writer, speaking from a different landscape and with a plainness of style that invokes the Midwest and invites comparison with Willa Cather. But as William Faulkner said and wrote, Powers's subjects are circumscribed by "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing."

And so we return to Powers's comedy. For his humor is deeply funny both for what is on the page, and for that which is unstated. Indeed, with a single sentence Powers creates paragraphs of detail in the reader's imagination; we have seen each of these people and each of these situations before, oftentimes in the mirror. But Powers is gentle, and gives us a kind of catharsis as we follow the bumbling path of flawed souls, venial, petty, and helpless, but not hopeless.

If there is a counterpoint in American letters to which Powers should be compared, then I suggest H.L. Mencken, for in many ways Powers is the answer to Mencken, for all which he found contemptible, Powers has also found funny, but more importantly sacred. Mencken's American cynicism and misanthropy have been answered by Powers with prose that is his match, and a literary redemption of the common soul that could only have been inspired by both a love of man and a love of the written word. Until the Library of America recognizes Powers for the giant of American writing that he is, we will have to be content with this edition. A pity, for the binding is poor, and already sections are falling out of my copy. From heaven, Powers must observe this condition with the wry and ironic amusement to which, during his earthly life, he gave voice.

Great stories by an American original
These wonderful stories mine the whole of American life, but Powers was at his best when he wrote about the very narrow slice of life that confines, constricts and defines the lives of Catholic priests.The comedy inherentin parish and church politics, the worldliness of men who have supposedlydedicated their lives to God, the loneliness of other men who havediscovered that God is absent from most of their daily routine---these arePowers' favorite subjects, and in exploring them he produced some of thesaddest and funniest stories to be found outside of Joyce's"Dubliners." ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of The 1963 National Book Award for Fiction

The hero of J.F. Powers's comic masterpiece is Father Urban, a man of the cloth who is also a man of the world. Charming, with an expansive vision of the spiritual life and a high tolerance for moral ambiguity, Urban enjoys a national reputation as a speaker on the religious circuit and has big plans for the future. But then the provincial head of his dowdy religious order banishes him to a retreat house in the Minnesota hinterlands. Father Urban soon bounces back, carrying God's word with undaunted enthusiasm through the golf courses, fishing lodges, and backyard barbecues of his new turf. Yet even as he triumphs his tribulations mount, and in the end his greatest success proves a setback from which he cannot recover.First published in 1962, Morte D'Urban has been praised by writers as various as Gore Vidal, William Gass, Mary Gordon, and Philip Roth. This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.Amazon.com Review
A comic masterpiece by a criminally neglected writer, J.F. Powers'sMorte D'Urban has had a checkered commercial history from the verystart. The original publisher failed to reprint the novel after it won the1963 National Book Award, and although it's had various paperbackreincarnations since then, these too have tended to disappear from theshelves. Perhaps any novel about Catholic priests in the ProtestantMidwest would be in for some tough sledding. Still, it's hard to think of afunnier piece of writing, or one more accurately attuned to the deadpanrhythms of American speech. Doubters need only consult Father Urban'ssermons, which mix pure banality and theological hairsplitting in suchexact proportions as to suggest Babbitt in a clerical collar. Yet Powersalso manages a kind of last-minute legerdemain, transforming his satiricromp into a deadly serious, and deeply moving, exploration of faith.

The satire, of course, is itself worth the price of admission. Poor FatherUrban, mired in a 10th-rate religious order!

It seemed to him that the Order of St. Clement labored under the curse ofmediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. In Europe, theClementines hadn't (it was always said) recovered from the FrenchRevolution. It was certain that they hadn't ever really got going in theNew World. Their history revealed little to brag about--one saint (the HolyFounder) and a few bishops of missionary sees, no theologians worthy of thename, no original thinkers, not even a scientist. The Clementines wereunique in that they were noted for nothing at all.

Customer Reviews (22)

Incredible A Lost Treasure.
This book won the national book award in 1963 for fiction. Our hero Father Urban is a little quirky and self-centered; yet even with those faults it is hard not to sympathize with him. I approached this book with some regret. It was the last of Powers' works I would have the chance to read. So I took my time and slowly read chapter by chapter, savoring the book over a much longer period than I normally would. The book was both satisfying and a bit of a disappointment. It was satisfying in that I have now completed the published books of J. F. Powers. It was also sad because of this fact. It was a bit disappointing in that the story feels unfinished. Like a chapter was left out when it went to printing.

Some of the plot was inevitable, and predictable, but the characters you meet along the way make the book very engaging and entertaining. I am a post Vatican II baby. As such, I do not know the Latin Mass - have only read books, and seen films of what the church was like before that period. Powers is a master at creating characters, and characters that are believable. His priests, brothers, monsignors and even bishops are believable to anyone who has had serious interactions even with clergy of today. I know of a priest locally who could be an Urban walking off the page to take up ministry today.

Many segments of this book were previously published as short stories in a variety of sources. Powers was a master at the short story, but his creative genius was his ability to take those short stories and turn them into a convincing novel. He has done this with both his published novels - this book Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Both books were nominated for the National Book Award and Urban won. That is the testament to Powers' power and prowess with the quill. It is also witness to his ability to transcend the short story, a genre that appears to be going by the wayside, and to compile books of great depth and insight. Modern author Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, wanted to write a book of short stories, but his publisher, even with his popularity after Fight Club, would not allow him a book of short stories. Then Palauniuk wrote Haunted a collection of characters' personal stories told by a group of writers locked in a building. Powers achieves what Palahniuk does not in that his stories flow together seamlessly, where Palahniuk's are obviously individual stories.

This book is worth the read for anyone wanting a glimpse of insight into post World War II Catholicism, especially in the Midwest. But it is also a great study of people and why they do what they do - what drives them to achieve, their dreams and ultimately their failures and defeats. Unfortunately I have now read all of Powers' fiction. Fortunately the 2 books and 3 collections of short stories can be savored again and again. I can predict I have not finished with reading Powers, or Urban.

Incredible A Lost Treasure.
This book won the national book award in 1963 for fiction. Our hero Father Urban is a little quirky and self-centered; yet even with those faults it is hard not to sympathize with him. I approached this book with some regret. It was the last of Powers' works I would have the chance to read. So I took my time and slowly read chapter by chapter, savoring the book over a much longer period than I normally would. The book was both satisfying and a bit of a disappointment. It was satisfying in that I have now completed the published books of J. F. Powers. It was also sad because of this fact. It was a bit disappointing in that the story feels unfinished. Like a chapter was left out when it went to printing.

Some of the plot was inevitable, and predictable, but the characters you meet along the way make the book very engaging and entertaining. I am a post Vatican II baby. As such, I do not know the Latin Mass - have only read books, and seen films of what the church was like before that period. Powers is a master at creating characters, and characters that are believable. His priests, brothers, monsignors and even bishops are believable to anyone who has had serious interactions even with clergy of today. I know of a priest locally who could be an Urban walking off the page to take up ministry today.

Many segments of this book were previously published as short stories in a variety of sources. Powers was a master at the short story, but his creative genius was his ability to take those short stories and turn them into a convincing novel. He has done this with both his published novels - this book Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Both books were nominated for the National Book Award and Urban won. That is the testament to Powers' power and prowess with the quill. It is also witness to his ability to transcend the short story, a genre that appears to be going by the wayside, and to compile books of great depth and insight. Modern author Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, wanted to write a book of short stories, but his publisher, even with his popularity after Fight Club, would not allow him a book of short stories. Then Palauniuk wrote Haunted a collection of characters' personal stories told by a group of writers locked in a building. Powers achieves what Palahniuk does not in that his stories flow together seamlessly, where Palahniuk's are obviously individual stories.

This book is worth the read for anyone wanting a glimpse of insight into post World War II Catholicism, especially in the Midwest. But it is also a great study of people and why they do what they do - what drives them to achieve, their dreams and ultimately their failures and defeats. Unfortunately I have now read all of Powers' fiction. Fortunately the 2 books and 3 collections of short stories can be savored again and again. I can predict I have not finished with reading Powers, or Urban.

Incredible A Lost Treasure.
This book won the national book award in 1963 for fiction. Our hero Father Urban is a little quirky and self-centered; yet even with those faults it is hard not to sympathize with him. I approached this book with some regret. It was the last of Powers' works I would have the chance to read. So I took my time and slowly read chapter by chapter, savoring the book over a much longer period than I normally would. The book was both satisfying and a bit of a disappointment. It was satisfying in that I have now completed the published books of J. F. Powers. It was also sad because of this fact. It was a bit disappointing in that the story feels unfinished. Like a chapter was left out when it went to printing.

Some of the plot was inevitable, and predictable, but the characters you meet along the way make the book very engaging and entertaining. I am a post Vatican II baby. As such, I do not know the Latin Mass - have only read books, and seen films of what the church was like before that period. Powers is a master at creating characters, and characters that are believable. His priests, brothers, monsignors and even bishops are believable to anyone who has had serious interactions even with clergy of today. I know of a priest locally who could be an Urban walking off the page to take up ministry today.

Many segments of this book were previously published as short stories in a variety of sources. Powers was a master at the short story, but his creative genius was his ability to take those short stories and turn them into a convincing novel. He has done this with both his published novels - this book Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Both books were nominated for the National Book Award and Urban won. That is the testament to Powers' power and prowess with the quill. It is also witness to his ability to transcend the short story, a genre that appears to be going by the wayside, and to compile books of great depth and insight. Modern author Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, wanted to write a book of short stories, but his publisher, even with his popularity after Fight Club, would not allow him a book of short stories. Then Palauniuk wrote Haunted a collection of characters' personal stories told by a group of writers locked in a building. Powers achieves what Palahniuk does not in that his stories flow together seamlessly, where Palahniuk's are obviously individual stories.

This book is worth the read for anyone wanting a glimpse of insight into post World War II Catholicism, especially in the Midwest. But it is also a great study of people and why they do what they do - what drives them to achieve, their dreams and ultimately their failures and defeats. Unfortunately I have now read all of Powers' fiction. Fortunately the 2 books and 3 collections of short stories can be savored again and again. I can predict I have not finished with reading Powers, or Urban.

Incredible A Lost Treasure.
This book won the national book award in 1963 for fiction. Our hero Father Urban is a little quirky and self-centered; yet even with those faults it is hard not to sympathize with him. I approached this book with some regret. It was the last of Powers' works I would have the chance to read. So I took my time and slowly read chapter by chapter, savoring the book over a much longer period than I normally would. The book was both satisfying and a bit of a disappointment. It was satisfying in that I have now completed the published books of J. F. Powers. It was also sad because of this fact. It was a bit disappointing in that the story feels unfinished. Like a chapter was left out when it went to printing.

Some of the plot was inevitable, and predictable, but the characters you meet along the way make the book very engaging and entertaining. I am a post Vatican II baby. As such, I do not know the Latin Mass - have only read books, and seen films of what the church was like before that period. Powers is a master at creating characters, and characters that are believable. His priests, brothers, monsignors and even bishops are believable to anyone who has had serious interactions even with clergy of today. I know of a priest locally who could be an Urban walking off the page to take up ministry today.

Many segments of this book were previously published as short stories in a variety of sources. Powers was a master at the short story, but his creative genius was his ability to take those short stories and turn them into a convincing novel. He has done this with both his published novels - this book Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Both books were nominated for the National Book Award and Urban won. That is the testament to Powers' power and prowess with the quill. It is also witness to his ability to transcend the short story, a genre that appears to be going by the wayside, and to compile books of great depth and insight. Modern author Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, wanted to write a book of short stories, but his publisher, even with his popularity after Fight Club, would not allow him a book of short stories. Then Palauniuk wrote Haunted a collection of characters' personal stories told by a group of writers locked in a building. Powers achieves what Palahniuk does not in that his stories flow together seamlessly, where Palahniuk's are obviously individual stories.

This book is worth the read for anyone wanting a glimpse of insight into post World War II Catholicism, especially in the Midwest. But it is also a great study of people and why they do what they do - what drives them to achieve, their dreams and ultimately their failures and defeats. Unfortunately I have now read all of Powers' fiction. Fortunately the 2 books and 3 collections of short stories can be savored again and again. I can predict I have not finished with reading Powers, or Urban.

An unclassifiable masterpiece of subtlety and discernment
At first, I wondered how someone could write so convincingly about a Catholic priest without having been one himself; I know nothing about the author J. F. Powers.And, I have no way of knowing if a reader who was not raised Catholic will be familiar with the references to the Church and its hierarchy, or with the differences among the priests' Orders, or with the style or culture peculiar to the Catholic Church.The key to the structure of Morte d'Urban--and to the very existence of such a novel--is that it's set in the 1950s when Americans' lives were changing after World War II toward habits of conspicuous consumption.And the Catholic Church hierarchy knew it had to change, too, in response to these lifestyle developments in its primary "customers," the new kind of Catholics emerging after the war years.

Author J. F. Powers illustrated these changes perfectly when he has the fictitious Order of St. Clement realize that if they are to attract wealthy Catholics to their summer retreat, they will have to build a golf course at St. Clement's Hill.And it's significant that Powers has his main character, Father Urban, be the kind of cultured person who (after the 1960s) no longer experienced a religious calling, or for whom the Church no longer had a place: Urban plays a professional game of golf, he has a taste for fine dining, fine cars, intelligent conversation, articulate speech-making--in short, the cultural pluses which his Italian or French counterparts would have taken for granted.

It's important, too, that Powers has his Father Urban be 54, tall, handsome, and athletic.Church-goers with money have expectations of such a priest which, as one character says, can lead to a "comedy of errors."Billy Cosgrove, Sylvia Bean, and Sally Thwaites all have expectations of their urbane Urban; and all have flaws, or faults of manners, or misguided ways of being in the world, which lead them into conflict with Father Urban's sense of integrity, of discernment, and of proper conduct.

To say this is a moral novel would be too simplistic.In a way, the book is not a comedy at all, but a tale of cultural decline, of missed connections.This novel shows how people become alienated from one another because they lack knowledge of humanity, the sort that Father Urban has.It is Urban's fate to be a misunderstood messenger when what would have most suited his temperament was to be the sort of Old World, cultured priest like his mentor Father Placidus.Confined to the isolation of Minnesota, those serving God must face their earthly limitations--hopefully with as much style and savoir faire as Father Urban.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A writer's writer worth of rediscovery
These ten stories were first published in 1947. They reflect Powers, Midwestern-born and bred, as intrigued by the possibilities of writing about Catholic priests. This slim volume treats as well as what then was called the "race problem" with contemporary African American tensions; baseball; "The Old Bird" where a middle-aged man looking for work during war when he knows it's the only reason he could find the menial temp job he must accept, and a nuanced story, "Renner," about refugees and anti-Semitism. As a Catholic Worker who had been jailed for his opposition to WW2, Powers possessed the moral strength of convictions rooted in signs of contradiction. He also peered about with an unsparing eye for dissembling, and called his fellow Americans to task for it. Yet he remained free of sanctimony, no mean feat, and counted himself culpable too.

No wonder that Thomas Merton admired him; Powers went on with only twenty more stories over a long career. (Born 1917, he began publishing stories in the mid-1940s; he died in 1999). A "writer's writer" who refused to glad-hand or cater to the mass market, his fiction in the post-Vatican II age failed to keep the attention of a fickle readership, but in retrospect his questioning of the insularity of a Babbitry within the separatist mentality endemic to the Catholic Church in the middle of the century may have hastened its own undoing! Powers had enduring ties with those in the Church agitating for social reform and relevant liturgies. His concerns may be muted in his art, but they resonate for an attentive audience today.

The best stories here probe gently but relentlessly how moral dilemmas unfold within a superficially trivial job or mundane career, often one in a rectory or chancery. This concentration enriches the collections "The Presence of Grace (1956) & "Look How the Fish Live, expanding the themes of his early stories. and his novels "Morte d'Urban" (1962, winner of the National Book Award) and "Wheat That Springeth Green" (1988) of which build on the promise first shown here, lean towards mordantly tragi-comic scrutiny of clerical life in unnamed Middle America.

His thirty stories have been collected, with no additions, as "The Stories of J.F. Powers" in 2001 by New York Review Press in a handsome edition, as well as the two novels each reissued. Painstakingly crafted, the lesser stories in "Prince" about racial tensions date themselves, however, compared to five clerical stories. "The Lord's Day" examines tensions between a domineering pastor and a convent full of cowed sisters. "The Valiant Woman" looks at a meddling housekeeper from a priest's perspective, as they are doomed to live together but remain vastly apart in their curious intimacy. "The Forks" poses a moral dilemma for an upright if uptight curate under a pastor's annoying but worldly-wise readiness to compromise one Gospel truth for another just as compelling. "Lions, Hearts, Leaping Does" offers a heartbreakingly vivid if uncharacteristically lyrical account of a dying friar's last days. It ends with an epiphany equal to any in one of Power's inspirations along with Hemingway and Faulkner, James Joyce's "Dubliners," A no less dramatic final line less ambiguously and more chillingly concluded the longer narrative of a restive associate pastor wanting a promotion in "The Prince of Darkness." This story prepares in retrospect for the fictional dioceses of Great Plains and the wonderfully apropos Ostengothenberg in the later work of Powers.

While unfairly consigned today to a mid-20c Catholic ghetto of once respected writers, Powers need not be read only by those interested in religious themes in American fiction. His assured style pares down what he ruefully and slightly satirically often observes while allowing a tenderness and humanity to filter in, akin to stories today of a superficially far different author, George Saunders. Like Saunders, Powers listens to everyday Americans off the beaten track, in nondescript suburbs and featureless tracts, and makes them as worthy of compassion and dignity as any hero of a revered epic. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of short stories about provincial life in the American Midwest and published for the first time in Britain. Powers, an American author with a reputation for being alert to the humour stored up in every human drama, and who lists among his admirers such literary figures as Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor and Anthony Burgess, has been described by Jonathan Raban as "one of the funniest, most socially exact, most heart rending and most thoroughly enjoyable writers alive". J.F. Powers lives in Minnesota, and is the award-winning author of "Prince of Darkness", "The Presence of Grace" and "Morte d'Urban". His new novel, "Wheat that springeth green" is published simultaneously by Chatto. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Final collection of stories from Powers: Midwestern angst & faith
Judy Smith's review posted here simply copies, without attribution, the blurb on the dust jacket.

So, here's my original one. [I have reviewed on Amazon the earlier collections in their original format, "Prince of Darkness" (1947) and "Presence of Grace," (1956) as well as the novel "Morte d'Urban" (1962). The collected three thin volumes, thirty stories total, are reprinted as "The Stories of J.F. Powers" in 2001 from NY Review Press, as well as reissues of the two novels.]

This, the third and final collection of his stories, picks up in the era before (Vatican II, with selections as early as 1957, although given the slow nature of Powers' preparation, these ten stories did not appear in one volume until 1975! They show a changing Church, obviously, and Powers appears to be, as his colleague Jon Hassler called him, "a saint with a bad temper" as he grumpily tries to-- as one of his priests tries to put it, answer the unanswerable question. "How can we make sanctity as appealing as sex to the common man?" The friar answered the seminarian merely that we must keep on trying, that's all. This commonsensical, quite Midwestern and drolly American reply from mid-20c Minnesota, as lived by Powers and fictionalized if thinly in his two novels and his thirty stories, on second thought leaves out one of the key problems facing his priests and laity as they grapple with a world where Holy Resting Place is proposed as a less off-putting name for the parish dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre, where guitar masses and clergy yearning to break free of celibacy contend with old-school clerics and restive bishops before and after being put out to pastoral pasture in the rural diocese of Ostergothenberg.

The dilemma is this. Sex and sanctity confounded the clergy, as "Priestly Fellowship" maps in the post-conciliar era. But, for the laypeople determined to toughen it our by the dictates that Powers sincerely lived by and doggedly believed in, I suppose that the harsh reality of an unpampered life as a critical favorite who sold few stories and fewer books and with a wife who longed to break free of her childraising duties to get back to writing (she managed but a handful of published stories and one novel, 1964-9 "Rafferty & Co.") did get the pair of talented artists but destitute breadwinners down in the dumps. Even Powers and his wife, writer Betty Wahl, contended with as he admitted once five children when they were not really cut out to be parents. One wonders if they had been able to avail themselves of contraception in their own procreative years if Powers & Wahl could have devoted themselves more to their shared craft, and if fewer mouths to feed (Thomas Merton recalled on a visit in the 1950s to the Powers home near St John's U in St Cloud five children lined up by size bringing in the beer steins to celebrate the monk's dinner as a detour from Merton's attendance at a psychological conference at the monastery in Minnesota) could have meant more fiction from the happy couple. Instead, much of this slim volume must have been written during their stints back and forth from Ireland and in teaching in various colleges here. Powers' painstaking concentration meant few stories over what here's nineteen years since his previous collection and thirteen since his first novel.

The results, as they say, are mixed. The title story opens promisingly, a suburban father (modelled on the author and his own family's set of fated foreclosures on their homestead) who finds that whether DDT, nature's cruelty, Civil Defense, the expanding local college, parking lots and dorms encroaching and then obliterating his home, domestication has its downsides. The wild, the unforeseen, and the military-industrial complex all subtly bear down relentlessly upon one harried paterfamilias.

"Bill" will later be incorporated and expanded into his last novel, the 1988 (see about slow preparation?) "Wheat that Springeth Green", as will "Priestly Fellowship." Here we find Fr. Joe Hackett, forty-four, dealing with a new curate whose name the pastor never finds out-- and Joe never comes out straight and asks!-- and then the curate's pals, one an ex-seminarian proudly atheist but still team-teaching a class in Scripture with his old seminary professor; the other clerics reflect one cautious man who Joe pegs as a future bishop, one who seems overwhelmed by the changes, and one who embraces them to the point of relativism and folly. It's not hard to see where Powers' sympathies lie.

The other clerical stories take place in the same world as Powers' earlier fiction. "One of Them," although perhaps a bit long-winded as are all of the clerical stories here (but one can blame Powers little for stretching out and elaborating his wonderfully wry diocese and its familiar, fatalistic, and flawed priests) good-naturedly examines a convert, Simpson, who is ordained and sent to a nearly monosyllabic, extremely laconic old Irish pastor. Simp must learn the ropes and finds, as in a marriage, becoming more like his housemate than he bargained for. This story reminded me of earlier stories in "Presence" and its tone takes more from the 1950s-era by the quaintly dated nature of the pastor's attitudes as compared to the newer, post-Vatican II-era clerics being minted. We also return to a minor character from "Presence," Fr. Beeman, who will appear in a similar role in "Wheat."

"Keystone" takes a long look at a bishop of that certain diocese who aims at a new cathedral lacking what the newer Church and trendy architects dismiss as no longer needed: an arch cementing the portals together to bear their weight. Written originally around the time of "Morte d'Urban," when Vatican II was in session, this long tale explores more of the power struggles that John Dullinger, bishop of Ostergothenberg, must contend with along with his up-and-coming auxiliary, Msgr Gau.

After the auxiliary takes over, John retires, more or less, but finds renewal in "Farewell," filling on "livery-detail" for small parishes on short-term loan-- much as Fr Urban had in "Morte." Bishop Dullinger begins to rediscover his vocation, and his true calling, until, just as the Clementine preacher had in the novel, the bishop too finds a sudden deus ex machina while out in the open. These two stories show Powers operating with accustomed ease in his own imaginary terrain, not too far from his real surroundings.

Brief pieces for the first time enter a collection of Powers' short works. "Moonshot" purports to be a play, but it's more of a sketch, a rather shallow send-up of the Cold War race in space to build moon buildings out of pumice rock. It's very slight. The even briefer "Folks" attempts to poke fun at wife-swapping and the end-of-the year holiday letter sent another couple who's drifted away from such conviviality, but again the tone is arch and the style forced. Better is "Pharisees," which taken in light of the ex-sem Conklin in "Priestly Fellowship" as the ex-Pharisee makes more sense. This short tale's a send-up of the Publican & Pharisee parable, and reveals the only direct parody of an actual bible story that I can recall in Powers. It's a novelty, but it grows on you with repeat readings by its sly knowing wit.

"Tinkers" ends with Powers' only story dealing directly (in a manner of speaking) with his Irish experience. A great counterpart to his wife's novel, which was all about their South Co. Dublin suburban sojourns on-and-off in the 50s and 60s. As Jon Hassler's noted, it's so understated at times that a reader risks missing the point, but it's an oblique commentary on itinerancy, the pretensions of returning Yanks, and the indomitable attitudes of their Hibernian hosts towards those with a bit more cash and lots less sense than they think. Powers and Wahl both send up their own American pretensions at the hands of Irish landlords, workers, and neighbors who manage to undermine any hope that, as Powers and Wahl once believed, they could actually live in Ireland in a time half a century ago far less expensive than now and save money from paying rent in Minnesota, enough to get by on savings and simply write!

Short stories: (From dust jacket write up)
Here again, we find ourselves in quotidian, heartland America, where the absurdities of family life abound, where cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, mildly opportunistic clergy still go about their chosen work...but with a difference now. Something has happened to the world of ordinary people, of imperious pastors and downtrodden curates, to the certain landscape of the Country and the Church...where a young father, entangled by his children in the fate of a baby bird, despairs of Nature's (and God's) failures...where a serious-minded young priest, arriving on the last ripple in the long incoming tide of converts, finds himself adrift on the choppy seas of feminism and ecumenism...where a lonely and convivial if not always congenial pastor wants to be both pal and mentor to the new breed of curates ("not too bright and in love with themselves")...where an aging bishop, whose pastoral letters often mention "the keystone of authority," builds a new cathedral...one, unfortunately, without a keystone...but who, later, in another story, rediscovers his true vocation, in retirement, while in the course of investigating miraculous visions. There is a story about a pastor who can't find out his curate's name. There is a story, set in Ireland, about "Americas thriftiest living author" and his family. There are also two cautionary tales, about wife swapping and hypocrisy, and a short play about the first American expedition to the moon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Lovely pictures,beautiful words...
The late Joseph O'connell was a master sculptor,craftsman andartist,whose main work, it appears was liturgical.thereby consigning him to a lesser place among artists in this era. Too bad,for his work leaps off the page,full of life and mirth,celebration and deep pathos. He seemed to understand suffering in a way that was not self-indulgent,and portrayed it in stone,magnificently.He did hands very well, touching, probing holding caressing, and for me they seem to hold the key to some of his works. My only complaint is that this book is quite expensive,though handsomely done.Funny when reading this I felt more comfortable listening to Count Basie and Louis Armstrong then Ambrosian chant or William Byrd. Perhaps that too, is a tribute to this fine, wonderful artist.

Joe
Joe O'Connell was a freelance sculptor and carver in central Minnesota who made a life out of wood and stone, carving for churches mainly, and his work is quite a wonder to behold. This book is the most complete so far andincludes some fine photos, but of course O'Connell work encountered in thereal world ---- the crucifixes, the BVMs, the marvellous carvings in whichhe represents Ellington and Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong as angels ----the real thing is even more astonishing. He was a folk artist and a fineartist and the book is an homage to him.

My Thoughts on My Father's Work
My father was an incredible sculptor.He lived his life to create the work you see in this book.I am honored by all that was written about him and I am thrilled to see this book put together with such care. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Different publishing date, same content: first book-length study
This review copies that for a 1968 Twayne American Authors series printing of this book and the author as "J.V. Hagopian." The only difference is the binding.

Twayne Publishers seems to have once sought to cover nearly every writer of note anywhere anytime, and this 1968 study, in less than 200 pages, efficiently surveys this Midwestern mid-20c writer's short stories from the 1947 "Prince of Darkness" and the 1956 "Presence of Grace" collections, as well as the National Book Award novel "Morte d'Urban" (1962). Hagopian notes that this critical investigation was the first extensive, book-length one published, and I sympathized with his acknowledgement that the draft he sent to Powers was "severely criticized," but Hagopian stands his ground after revisions and critiques in vivid and well-written segments many aspects of Powers' fiction, expanding the facile "tragicomic" or "satirical" reactions that previous critics have tended to trot out as stock phrases but have not expanded enough upon. Hagopian also improves upon clerical critics who had tended to place Powers in a "Catholic ghetto" or had reacted uneasily to Powers' keen eye and grim ear for the foibles of men committed to the divine imperative while having to court the worldly powers to keep their parishes running and their debts paid.

Hagopian plays fair to the considerable strengths while accounting for the occasional weaknesses in the stories to date. He is especially adept at navigating the tricky plot direction, deadly accurate but rather astringent prose, and nearly submerged craft beneath not caricatures but characterizations in the challenging "Morte." Notably, he also looks at early and awkward essays for the Catholic Worker, his first stories on the "Negro question" from the early postwar years, and the expected highlight-- Powers' 1950s flourishing as a incisive observer with dry wit and acerbic compassion of Midwestern Catholic clergy in the rural Minnesota prairie towns. This short study complements another (an even shorter anthology of essays by critics) that came out nearly concurrently by Fallon Evans, and the two books together serve well those interested in this largely overlooked writer.

His world of a largely pre-Vatican II Church did not outlast his own life, and most critics would tend today to regard the peak of Powers in the period Hagopian (and Evans' 1960s reviewers) surveyed. It may be no fault of Hagopian, but perhaps the standards enforced by Twayne restricted the amount of detail that he could provide for some analyses-- those in "Presence" in particular might have gained much from the type of close reading he gives not only to the more famous "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does" and the Father Burner stories but the suburban study "Blue Island." Some stories, naturally, gain more attention, but the pace speeds up (as for "Keystone") when it needed to slow to allow for fuller explication of textual support for Hagopian's general critiques.

After these studies appeared, another short story collection came out in 1975, "Look How the Fish Live," and a second elegiac yet unsparing novel, "Wheat That Springeth Green," in 1988. Powers wrote slowly and carefully over his four-plus decades of activity. His two novels and collected stories (after his death in 1999) have been restored to print by the NY Review Press in the early 00s. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Mid-century Midwest, Catholics lay & clerical both struggle
Re-reading this 1956 collection, the second of three and considered Power's best short fiction, I admired his ability to make me laugh and squirm at these darkly comic, gently compassionate examinations of 1950s Middle America, Catholic style. As the village of Sherwood (where some stories take place in a vaguely pinpointed but accurately mapped terrain) becomes swallowed up into Minneapolis suburbia, as the Church begins to find its parishioners assimilating beyond the reach of vestibule religious tracts into the Welcome Wagon invitations of the middle class tract, Powers shifts accordingly. While "The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories"(1947) mixed accounts of race relations, refugees and antisemitism, and baseball into the strongest tales, those about but also transcending the limits of clerical life in rectories across an austere upper Midwestern landscape where hamlet edges into prairie, this follow-up presents nine investigations of Catholic life. Most are clerical, and those that feature the laity tend to wear the trappings of their faith less obviously, as fits the subject matter. But each one peers into the dilemmas of compromise, how one must balance what's rendered to God with what's given to Caesar.

"Dawn" deals with a mysterious letter marked in the collection for Peter's Pence "The Pope- Personal." The struggle between prevarication and subtle greed, local control and papal authority, reverberates at the lowly level of one parish. "Death of a Favorite" and its sequel, "Defection of a Favorite," both are narrated by a parish cat who keeps a careful eye on an associate pastor (the same Father Burner who gave the title story in "Prince of Darkness" his own unwanted nickname) who the cat must deal with once the cat's protector is away at the hospital. These two entries are rare in that Powers uses a cat's eye view to remove his Joycean style of indirect discourse out of the human into the anthropomorphic. Some critics lower these two stories slightly for the bit of a trick ending "Death" provides, but they do show Powers varying, to generally successful and genially playful effect, his usual mode.

"The Poor Thing" gnaws at the tension between an shrewish elderly woman and her female caretaker who's been finagled and then blackmailed into the duty; Powers knows that stereotypes can never be trusted, and manipulates our view of the nagging Dolly so that we are taken aback by her humanity, persisting despite the fact that none of us would envy Teresa's employment, beholden at the hands of the well-named Mrs> Shepherd. This story, for me, recalled Flannery O'Connor's own perspective.

"Blue Island" is subtler, but puts the knife in as deeply by its conclusion. A timid housewife in a new suburban home opens her door to the Welcome Wagon lady, and tries to deal with the consequences of friendship vs. profit, while her husband skirts the line off stage largely, between his Italian Catholic upbringing with hints of bootlegging and the respectable society where, as the lady tells the younger woman, she looks like a fair, blonde, beautiful Swede. This story's climax I found nearly unbearable, and it relentlessly builds to its conclusion no less brutal than stories in "Dubliners."

Thomas Merton, Flannery herself, Frank O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and Sean O'Faolain all admired Powers. His painstaking craft combined with his moral sense eloquently, even as he no less than Hemingway or Joyce tried to listen to how his characters echoed real Americans, both on the outside in their Midwestern bitter truths and laconic delusions, and on the inside as they struggled to keep their faith in a secular, or at least purportedly Protestant, capitalist society where the military-industrial complex triumphs in the post-war boom. This critique comes obliquely, but those familiar with Powers' own thirteen-month sentencing for pacifism during the WW2 and his wartime involvement with the Catholic Worker and social justice campaigns can recognize the influence of his informed meditation upon a contradictory apostolate that the priests were vowed to follow in such an American go-getter expansionist culture where Babbitry contended against bigotry and luxury.

"A Losing Game" takes an everyday wish for a new curate, Father Faber, to wrangle a table to type upon out of the basement of an unnamed pastor. This makes Fibber McGee's closet look like Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The dynamic of underling and superior, the unspoken and the desired, pulls this lighter tale along well. "Zeal" switches the roles, as a politic bishop on a package tour herding the laity to Europe seeks, on the initial stage by train eastward from the Midwest, to ease himself out of the grasp of an eager Father "Crazy" Early, who witnesses to the hard truths of the Gospel and his priestly vocation to preach it no matter the odds or to whom. These stories show, as do the earlier two about parishioners, a rather schematic set-up that plays off a pair of matched players in a game where one person seems aware of the manipulation through the narrative filter, but the other remains stubbornly or cleverly silent to our entreaties for hearing, as it were, the other side of the story. These stories serve perhaps as examples of sturdy fictional construction, but they prove a bit less entertaining due to their parallelism and refusal to let up the pressure that the design of the story places upon its trapped characters.

But, this is Powers' world. He refuses to ease up. If the message of Christ is to be fulfilled, then priests even more than laity must never be allowed to slacken. Even though they will. Which provides the energy, the uncertainty, the humanity here. "The Devil Was the Joker" introduces the Clementines, who will provide the context for his 1962 novel "Morte d'Urban." But we see less of them and more of a lay worker who sells their magazine and canvasses parishes to raise funds for the Order. Perhaps a "Pardoner's Prologue" from Chaucer updated for a booster- crazed, billboard- fixated nuclear age?

The balance between his manipulation to close a deal and his assistant, a seminary dropout and "cradle Catholic," plumbs the depths of profiteering in the Lord's name. But, it fairly presents this in the quest of two mismatched men, who must make a living, reconcile their needs with the message of their Maker, and sleep well at night. The story again ambitiously tackles this theme perhaps at a length slightly too condensed or too limited for such a deserving topic, but it also shows that this material needed release into the novel that Powers, assembling out of other stories in the later 50s, was already working towards.

Finally, the title story returns to Father Fabre and his attempt to match the needs of home visits to his parishioners with the perceived "blessing" of an unmarried, late middle-aged, and ambiguously paired couple who may or may not be technically sinning under the same roof. The title here seems to tilt neatly towards, again reminding me of Flannery O'Connor's predilection, towards a symbolic or anagogical interpretation, but this nudge from Powers overlooked, it again challenges the needs for tolerance against the demands of propriety within the Catholic parish community that still in mid-century America could exert such conformity upon its congregants. And in such decisions, balancing mercy against justice, expulsion with acceptance, Powers finds his milieu and his style fully emerge and flow into nine stories.

P.S. Powers lived 1917-99. All of Powers stories are now in one volume from New York Review Press, as well as reprints of his two novels, the other being "Wheat That Springeth Green," (1988). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Table of Contents
The articles in this book are each followed by a 1 to 3 page bibliography. Titles: Residues for Soil Conservation; Crop Residue Requirements to Control Wind Erosion; A Guide to Determining Crop Residue for Water; Effect of Residue Management Practices on the Soil; Effect of Crop Residues on the Soil: Chemical Environment and Nutrient Availability; Factors Affecting the Decomposition of Crop Residues by Microorganisms; Phytotoxicity Associated with Residue Management; Influence of Crop Residues on Plant Diseases; Weed Control Problems Associated with Crop Residue; Effect of Crop Residue System on Pest Problems in Field Corn; Crop Residue Management in Crop Rotation and Multiple Cropping Systems; Crop Selection for Specific Residue Management Systems; Alternative Uses for Excess Crop Residues; Machinery Selection for Residue Management Systems; New Perspectives for Soil, Water, and Energy Conservation. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Polymer Engineering and Science, published by Society of Plastics Engineers, Inc. on August 1, 2000. The length of the article is 6766 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Multilayer Method as a Tool for Depth Dependent Polymer Film Photodegradation Studies.
Author: O. V. Nepotchatykh
Publication: Polymer Engineering and Science (Refereed)
Date: August 1, 2000
Publisher: Society of Plastics Engineers, Inc.
Volume: 40Issue: 8Page: 1747

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Polymer Engineering and Science, published by Society of Plastics Engineers, Inc. on August 1, 2000. The length of the article is 6766 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Multilayer Method as a Tool for Depth Dependent Polymer Film Photodegradation Studies.
Author: O. V. Nepotchatykh
Publication: Polymer Engineering and Science (Refereed)
Date: August 1, 2000
Publisher: Society of Plastics Engineers, Inc.
Volume: 40Issue: 8Page: 1747

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more