Dream Date: Stories

by Jean McGarry

The writer's fourth collection of stories explores, with a touch of surrealism, the unconscious desires or fears inherent in relationships

Jean McGarry has been praised for her "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits" (New York Times Book Review) and as "a writer who honors the human condition" (Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a "gifted observer"...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801869374
• ISBN13: 9780801869372
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.9" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I read this book and have to say these are some of the best short stories I've read in the last decade. While the facetious title was probably a marketing mistake in its connotations of lite "chick lit," the stories themselves are profound meditations. The point to the essential loneliness of the self, whether in or out of love. Some of the stories show men and women in strife, trying to make contact through thick walls inadequate words. Others like "The Secret of his Sleep" show the wounded self retreating into private dreamworlds, abandoning the project of love altogether. For all that, the book does not promote despair, but rather a stoic kind of release.