Overview

"In the eleven stories collected in THE TALENT: STORIES OF AUTHORS AND ARTISTS, the world of the arts--visual, literary, and performing--is suggested in all its complexity. The stories dramatize life in the arts as a vocation above all others, and that creative production, despite its sacrifices and challenges, is full of moments of joy and discovery. Visual artists abound in this collection. There is Martin, the abstract sculptor in Lauren Acampora's ""Swarm,"" who has slipped into an unproductive retirement while the artists-in-the-making in Gabrielle Hovendon's ""A Quiet Pilgrimage to Every Last Ruined Saint"" lapse into obsession and near self-destruction as they use art to escape their painful and reductive worlds. ""The Door to Everything,"" by Frank Montesonti, finds Claire, a second-rate artist and granddaughter of a famous painter, making easy money painting the kind of art people hang over their couches. ""The Pickers"" by Ernest J. Finney features an artist who uses her talent to forge rare manuscripts and artwork. Stories of writers fill these pages as well. In M. G. Stephens's ""The Prodigal Daughter,"" Eileen, an Irish poet, gave up her career to follow her husband, a noted Cuban jazz musician, around the world. Now, in late middle-age as a recovered drug addict, she returns to Ireland to tend to their dying mother, who, in the end, admires her choice of adventure over domesticity. The would-be writer in Becky Mandelbaum's ""Babette Has Gone Missing,"" is tired of servitude to a husband and two sons. As a means of escape, she dashes off a story that wins her an artist residency in the Southwest. The freedom allows her to revel in the pleasure of writing a novel and having an affair with a handsome screenwriter. Additional stories in this collection dive deep into the lives and work of an editor, a photographer, actors, and a textile artist. These stories invariably show that the arts, in all their variety, are intertwined with the lives of their makers."

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9781945829703

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"""She opened the door. It was bright in the room to nothing, or the room to everything, whatever it was. Just the mauve color everywhere, no shadows, no wind or sound. She sat down on the platform cross-legged and looked over the edge. It didn't feel like she would fall. She threw the avocado into the void. It floated away from her, weightless, like it might in space."" - from Door to Everything, Frank Montesonti ""The entire façade was completely and miraculously shrouded in dark, voluptuous texture. Here and there, dash of color--fuchsia butterfly, lime green caterpillar--popped like jewels. It was exactly, incredibly, the way Martin had imagined it. The manifestation of the house from his dreams, the improbable pinnacle of his career."" - from Swarm, Lauren Acampora ""We are going to make it out. We're dreaming of our first masterpieces because there's nothing else to dream of. Growing up in Spasyavane, we need no prophets to tell us the odds against us. Our home lives are disasters, and this is no place for miracles, but we are not going to be like these other people. She is going to be a painter and I am going to be a woodworker, and together we will be famous."" - from A Quiet Pilgrimage to Every Last Ruined Saint, Gabrielle Hovendon ""By then she knew it was sketching that she was good at. Pencil or ink on white paper. She didn't like color; it confused things. By the time she got to high school she was doing elaborate scenes: city streets, buildings. Figures. Landscapes. But that was it. She never got any better, never found a different way to approach what she saw. Never took some next step that would change the direction she was going."" - from The Pickers, Ernest J. Finney ""What did writers do when they wrote? I imagined moody figures smoking cigarettes, twirling tumblers of whiskey as they bullied a typewriter. I didn't smoke or own a typewriter. What I had was Microsoft Word and an image of Babette--poor, rosy-cheeked Babette digging a secret bunker beneath the suburban bungalow where she prepared bologna sandwiches and mended her children's clothes."" - from Babette Has Gone Missing, Becky Mandelbaum"

Author Information

"Missouri Review Books editors Kristine Somerville and Speer Morgan bring a combined editorial experience of nearly eighty years to publishing literary works by writers of all ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities. A professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia since 1972, Morgan is among the most respected editors in literary publishing. The author of five novels and a collection of short stories and the editor of three other books, he's a past recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction and the recipient of an American Book Award for The Freshour Cylinders, a novel published in 1998. Somerville's work has appeared in a variety of magazines, including the North American Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. She oversees the Missouri Review's various promotional efforts, including direct mail, national advertising, fundraising dinners, and charity events. Somerville also oversees the Missouri Review's cover design and artwork, and writes TMR's ""found text"" and art features."

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