Get Free eBook Sample
Kevin Morris has written for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Filmmaker Magazine. He is the Co-producer of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon,” and producer of the classic documentary film, “Hands on a Hardbody.” He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles. This is his first collection of fiction.
White Man's Problems
by Kevin Morris
eBook
$14.99
-
ISBN-13:
9780802191427
- Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
- Publication date: 01/19/2015
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 240
- File size: 1 MB
Available on NOOK devices and apps
Want a NOOK? Explore Now
14.99
In Stock
In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working class East Coast, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation's capital, the heroes of White Man's Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older.
The themes of these perceptive, wry and sometimes humorous tales pose philosophical questions about conformity and class, duplicity and decency, and the actions and meaning of an average man's life. Morris's confident debut strikes the perfect balance between comedy and catastrophe—and introduces a virtuosic new voice in American fiction.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
-
- Emma's Table: A Novel
- by Philip Galanes
-
- Montpelier Tomorrow
- by Marylee MacDonald
-
- The Search
- by Geoff Dyer
-
- The Last Animal
- by Abby Geni
-
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of…
- by BookRags
-
- Teacher's Pet
- by Andrew Neiderman
-
- After Life
- by Andrew Neiderman
-
- Music Through the Floor:…
- by Eric Puchner
-
- Elvissey
- by Jack Womack
-
- Business Travel Success: How…
- by Carol Margolis
-
- The Stories of Bernard Malamud
- by Bernard Malamud
-
- Goldengrove: A Novel
- by Francine Prose
-
- Half a Heart
- by Rosellen Brown
-
- Shoot the Money
- by Chris Wiltz
-
- Arcadia (SparkNotes Literature…
- by SparkNotesTom Stoppard
Recently Viewed
From the Publisher
"Remarkable. A brightly lit noir about the scariness of getting what you want. Anybody who has ever had the 'Now What’s?' should read that book."—David Carr, New York Times "Wonderful group of stories by Kevin Morris. Lyrical and honest in its look at modern American life. Buy this and you will love it."—Gus Van Sant
"Kevin Morris is that rare writer who bridges the class divide, illuminating the lives of working class characters and affluent professionals with equal authenticity and insight. White Man's Problems is a revelatory collection that marks the arrival of striking new voice in American fiction."—Tom Perrotta
“The echoes here are of a former generation of American writers—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver . . . deathless prose that might make you weep.”— USA Today
“Morris, an entertainment lawyer by trade, offers up shrewd, bitingly funny commentary on his own privileged class.”— TIME
"Life undermines the pursuit of success and status in these rich, bewildering stories…a finely wrought and mordantly funny take on a modern predicament by a new writer with loads of talent."— Kirkus Reviews
"These brutal and heartfelt stories will knock you out."—Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men
"Kevin Morris’s voice is Updike and Cheever and Carver"—Eric Roth, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump
"These clear-eyed morality tales showcase lightheartedness and angst in equal measure . . . Morris’s themes are universal in scope.”—Foreword Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2014-03-19Life undermines the pursuit of success and status in these rich, bewildering stories. True to the title, the heroes of Morris' first volume of fiction try to figure out the conundrums of love, career and family at every stage of the white male life cycle: A wiseass teenager stages a gross prank to catch the eye of a pretty cheerleader; a newly minted lawyer discovers that laziness and disaffection are no bar to advancement at his firm; an old man tries to forge a new connection to his dementia-stricken wife with the help of a pint-sized pianist. Most of the protagonists are professionals living in New York or LA who have their comfortable-to-affluent middle-aged lives shaken up by subtle instabilities. A rich producer shares a secret tragedy with a Mexican repairman; an investment banker is baffled by the technological universe he is supposed to have mastered; a funeral takes an Ivy League grad back to his working-class Irish Catholic roots; a hack attorney relaxes by posing as a crazy homeless man; and in the bleakly comic title story, a man reluctantly chaperoning his son's fifth-grade class on a Virginia field trip has his own callowness contrasted with the august figures of American history. Morris, an entertainment lawyer, producer and journalist, knows his characters and their worlds like the back of his hand. He endows them with both a sharply etched particularity and an iconic heft: "Jim Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack." His wonderfully evocative prose finds a world in tiny details of gesture and setting, in the casually arrogant stirring of coffee or the drab décor of a hotel room "conceived in mediocrity." The result is a cleareyed, finely wrought and mordantly funny take on a modern predicament by a new writer with loads of talent. A superb literary gallery of men who can't understand why life has given them what they want.< BR>★