| View Larger Image | Survival Rates | Paperbackby Mary Clyde (Author)
| List Price: | $12.00 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | W.W. Norton & Co. | | Page Count: | 288 Pages | | Publication Date: | February 01, 2001 | | Sales Rank: | 1,166,926st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Mary Clyde's stories explore not so much what has happened already but what happens next. Illness bristles through the book, magnifying emotional undercurrents: two teenage girls survive surgery and the prospect of never eating popcorn again; the stoicism of a husband with cancer infuriates his wife. Set in the desert Southwest, these stories show the influence of a landscape populated with cat-eating coyotes and car-crushing boulders. The characters are relative newcomers, some sharing the author's Mormon heritage. But they are survivors, relying on the ironies and blessings of ongoing life. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. |
Amazon.com Review
The nine stories in Mary Clyde's debut collection are populated by people in crisis. There are cancer victims and divorcees, doctors with personal problems and boyfriends with inferiority complexes. Some of the pieces are downright hilarious, others are quietly ironic, but all are branded with Clyde's offbeat perspective and quirky prose. Consider the title story, in which a married landscape architect is abashed by the form of cancer he's diagnosed with: "Dr. Rodgers, insisting that cancers have personalities, has told them thyroid cancer lacks any real oncological ambition." Bad enough to have cancer to begin with, but to be afflicted by "an embarrassment to the whole cancer community" is the straw that eventually breaks the architect's marriage. Both the humor and the cancer are deadlier in "Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose," in which two teenage girls who have met on an oncology ward fight to maintain their sense of normalcy in the face of surgeries, restricted diets, and ostomy bags: "I've got three hairs left," one tells the other at a lunch counter in a mall. "I'm playing up my eyes." Not every story is about death, per se, though the dead figure into most of them. In "Victor's Funeral Urn," for example, a divorced woman and her young son find a container of ashes by the roadside and are swept up in a search for its next of kin. And in "Pruitt Love" a young man intimidated by his girlfriend's eccentric family attempts to equalize the playing field by using his mother's death as a conversation piece. Love, faith, death, and plastic surgery are just a few of the themes Mary Clyde touches on in Survival Rates, a collection infused with wit, compassion, and a deep wellspring of hope. --Alix Wilber |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 3 reviews)
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Touching stories that fill your life by Nathaniel Curtis  5 Stars
August 14, 2008
Clyde achieved something wonderful with survival rates. Her stories are of the strangers we exchange smiles with on the street. Through Clyde's stories we see in the inner turmoil that could afflict anyone. The hidden pain and struggles that we are forced by society to supress.
I picked up Survival Rates to read on business trips. I now carry an extra copy with me to give to whoever is sitting next to me on the plane. It is wonderful book with stories that can be read and shared again and again.
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this book made me cry 5 Stars
September 20, 1999
The short stories in this book are each days out of what could be anyone's life, that's what makes it so touching. If anyone who likes this book and has feminist tendencies, I would also recommmend "the furies" by Janet Hobhouse.
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Stories that subtly transform the everyday  4 Stars
August 03, 1999
Mary Clyde's first book of stories won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia. These nine stories, some of which are more successful than others, focus upon instances of everyday life, both tragic and comic. Clyde's stories are populated by mothers and husbands, sons and daughters, girlfriends and boyfriends. There is nothing extraordinary about any of her characters, except perhaps their ability to comment upon their own lives and the lives of those around them. What is it, then, that makes the book worth seeking out and certainly worth reading?In her best stories, Mary Clyde's strength as a writer who explores the hidden depths within a character's seemingly mundane existence is on prominent display. Her tools are often simply objects that fall into her characters' lives. In the best story here, "Victor's Funeral Urn," a young divorced mother finds, by the side of the road, an urn containing a baby's ashes, which she takes home intending to somehow return it to its rightful owner. Through the unlikely presence of the urn in her home, she reaches a new understanding of her son's, and her own, loneliness and despair. In another story, the powerful "Jumping," Clyde explores how the survivors of a tragic accident are just as much victims as those who lost their lives.Though a couple of these stories seem formulaic or contrived, the majority of the writing here is distinguished by a lightness of touch and a willingness to let her characters speak for themselves that is refreshing at a time when many writers seem to be preaching at their readers. I applaud Mary Clyde's understated achievement in this book and will certainly be looking forward to her next.
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