The University of Wisconsin Press


Fiction


 

The Green Suit
Stories
Dwight Allen
With a new story


"The Green Suit speaks so closely to our lives."
—David L. Ulin, Chicago Tribune

This edition of Dwight Allen’s acclaimed story collection, The Green Suit, ends with a new story, rounding out a dozen interlinked tales about a well-to-do Kentucky family called the Sackriders. The stories cover a period of forty years, from the Vietnam War to the Age of Foreclosure. Chief among the Sackriders is Peter, son of a judge and a vitamin-pill-popping mother, brother to a sister whose troubles with boys take her far from Kentucky. He is a writer perhaps more in love with women (and, intermittently, men) than he is with words, whose eagerness to be loved leads him into alarming circumstances. He is a man with a yearning for transcendence and a penchant for betrayal.

The new story finds Sackrider in his mid-fifties, married for a second time, the father of a small child, and all tangled up with his next-door neighbor, an artist who likes to use the corpses of animals in his collages.

“Written with a grace and elegance that hearkens back to a time when sincerity and vision counted for more than mere irony.”
—T. C. Boyle

“There’s a gentle brio to Allen’s writing that captures the bemusement of his self-deprecating hero’s encounter with the Me Decade and its aftermath. . . . In this low-key wonder of a book, [Allen] creates sentences that take flight.”
—Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times

“There are layers of subtle meaning and plotting here; the work not only stands up to rereading but rewards the effort.”—Alice Elliott Dark, New York Times Book Review

Dwight Allen is author of the novels The Typewriter Satyr and Judge (called “a quietly moving accomplishment” by Publishers Weekly). A graduate of Lawrence University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, he worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker for close to a decade. His short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.


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Image of a green suit jacket on a hanger

October 2011
312 pp. 5 1/4 x 8

Book icon Paper $19.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-28364-3
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The Terrace Books logo is designed in the shape of a book with a Union chair in silhouette on the cover. The words Terrace Books, Madison, Wisconsin appear also.
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press


"Like a Southern Gothic version of Raymond Carver, Allen magnifies the small, painful incidents of everyday life, paying special attention to their comic absurdity. When he clicks, the results are marvelous."
–The Onion

 

 

   

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