Civilized Tribes
New and Selected Stories
Jerry Bumpus
9781884836077
278 pages
University of Akron Press
Overview
In a career that spans more than twenty-five years, Jerry Bumpus has published nearly 120 stories in such notable magazines as Esquire, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. Now the most intense and original of his short fictions have been brought together in The Civilized Tribes: New and Selected Stories. Grounded in a world that is almost familiar, inhabited by people who are not quite ordinary, these eleven tales will take readers far south of the psychological comfort zone, into a borderland of dark sensibility, brilliant humor, and unsettling sex. The stories told in this book reflect what Gertrude Stein had in mind when she revised Longfellow's famous lines: Life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange. Jerry Bumpus, saluted in the 1960s as the king of underground writers, has emerged in the 1990s to the broader acclaim that his innovative work has long deserved. The Civilized Tribes: New and Selected Stories reveals Bumpus as the sole occupant of his own category in American Fiction.
Author Bio
Jerry Bumpus, born in 1937 in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, is a professor of English at San Diego State University. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Missouri, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. He has published two novels, Anaconda and The Happy Convent, and four collections of short stories: Things in Place, Special Offer, Heroes and Villians, and Dawn of the Flying Pigs.
