Life in the Air Ocean: Stories

by Sylvia Foley and Cleo Qian

This stunning debut by a talented young writer brings together nine stories, some of them deeply shadowed, moving backward and forward in time to give us two generations of a family: the Mowrys of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 037540063X
• ISBN13: 9780375400636
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 161 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

The devastating precision of great writing...

Sylvia Foley's Life in the Air Ocean is a quick read in that it grabs you and won't let go. But layered and exact observations about the inner life and its consequent actions reward the careful reader. Her precise, beautiful writing captures the moments across years that make up a family history -- not the public one, but a private, under-the-skin history.

At once, heart-wrenching and funny.

This book is outstanding. A collection of stories, it reads more like a novel. Ruth, who might be referred to as the main character, is a survivor. But what makes her different, what makes her compelling, is the complexity of her responses to pain. Unwilling to let those who hurt her control her, she takes her own pain hostage, showing it, as it were, who is in charge. These stories are not about victimization; they are about the high price of rejecting the idea of victimization. Ruth gets hurt, yes. But her responses to pain are the responses of an organism. Her survival -- and indeed this is precisely what it is -- is survival in the most Darwinian terms: Ruth survives by adapting -- not by running away. There is triumph here, redemption in Ruth's fear of fear. This book is not so much a book to be read as a book to keep on reading.