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The Freedom in American Songs: Stories
Meet Xavier Boland, the untouchable cross-dresser, who walks loose and carefree as an old Broadway tune. Meet Miss Penrice, a lost old woman forced by wartime to parent a child for the first time. Meet a Zamboni mechanic turned funeral porteur, Madame Poirer’s lapdog (and its chastity belt), a congregation of hard-singing, sex-obsessed Pentecostals, and more. With The Freedom in American Songs, Kathleen Winter brings her unusual sensuality, lyrically rendered settings, and subversive humour to bear on a new story collection about modern loneliness, small-town gay teens, catastrophic love, and the holiness of ordinary life.
168 pages, Paperback
First published September 22, 2014
About the author
Kathleen Winter
18 books351 followersKathleen Winter's novel Annabel was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Orange Prize, and numerous other awards. Her Arctic memoir Boundless was shortlisted for Canada's Weston and Taylor non-fiction prizes, and her last novel Lost in September was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Born in the UK, Winter now lives in Montreal after many years in Newfoundland.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 2, 2019
You can’t always tell a book by its cover, so don’t let this gaudy, shouting cover mislead you. This is a collection of very fine short stories, taking place mostly in Canada, by one of my favorite Canadian authors, Kathleen Winter. Winter wrote the wonderful “Annabel” about a hermaphrodite growing up as a boy in a tiny Labradoran outport, and like “Annabel”, these stories are gentle and compassionate, small in scope but not in depth. And like Wayne/Annabel, the characters are somehow out of the mainstream, either in circumstance or personality. An easy read (mostly rather short — 12-14 — pages) but always deeply satisfying at the end.
January 18, 2015
These are stories of great originality that do what they want without paying much heed to narrative convention. Kathleen Winter writes with a sort of wild abandon, allowing her characters to act on impulse and refusing to wrap up her miniature dramas with tidy endings. The volume opens with three accomplished and mesmerizing "Marianne stories." Marianne Cullen is a young woman who has left the city and moved into a house in Aspel Harbour, where she is trying to write. The stories describe her encounters with neighbours and other locals in which she is subject to a bizarre proposition and learns that as an outsider unfamiliar with their traditions she will never really understand why these people do the things they do. Other stories present various sorts of miscommunications and misunderstandings and people making regrettable decisions as they try to connect with one another and with themselves. Standouts include the title story, in which two men who shared an intimate relationship as teenagers encounter one another for the first time in thirty-seven years, "You Seem a Little Bit Sad," in which Cara learns that everything she had assumed about the young man working behind the meat counter at the middle eastern grocery is wrong, and "Anhinga," in which Claire, in an attempt to assert her independence, finds herself alone and in peril and forced to accept some painful truths about herself. For the most part these are stories of the here and now, but Winter's perspective on the human condition is quirky (putting it mildly), and the reader may be forgiven for finding some of this strange and foreign. There are a couple of throwaways among the stories collected here, but all are interesting to varying degrees. Throughout the writing is lush and detailed. An enjoyable volume by the author of Annabel.
May 21, 2015
Loved it on the whole. Keen eye, beautiful writing. Editing blip near the end when a biographical story shifts to a he/she.
Loved this:
"The kitchen was too full. It was bursting with heat and laundry and the kind of trivial, pent-up arguments that scurry under kitchen tables and hide behind the tea tin and the biscuit box."
Loved this:
"The kitchen was too full. It was bursting with heat and laundry and the kind of trivial, pent-up arguments that scurry under kitchen tables and hide behind the tea tin and the biscuit box."
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September 22, 2015Wonderfully inventive and inventively varied stories. The Marianne Stories (Part 1) are more-or-less traditionally told, but the protagonist's search for meaning keep this mini story-cycle lively and unexpected. I'll never forget the wallpapering in 'The Christmas Room.'
Images stick and linger from part two as well. Truly a magnificent collection of stories.
Images stick and linger from part two as well. Truly a magnificent collection of stories.
Read
August 10, 2015Though I'm still not a huge fan of short stories, the writing here is fine (in the old sense of the word). The Marianne stories and title story were my favorites, there was a bit too much sad sack/world hating in some of the other protagonists for my taste.
April 6, 2016
the first 3 stories, the marrianne stories, did not grab me, i found them confused and boring. Fortunately, each story thereafter managed to engage happily.
August 2, 2018
I found these stories engaging. The narrator observes her neighbours, distinguishing the characteristics that make them very unique but never strange.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews