A01=Stanley Crawford
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Author_Stanley Crawford
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Category1=Fiction
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COP=United States
creative fiction
creative writing
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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Experimental fiction
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Language_English
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Price_€10 to €20
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Product details
- ISBN 9781573661836
- Weight: 264g
- Dimensions: 139 x 213mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2015
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In an age of contested values, Stanley Crawford’s wry Seed offers a sardonic exploration of the meaning of “values.” Curmudgeon Bill Starr’s end-of-life decisions illuminate the values that rule his life and his heirs’ and well as the material objects he and they perceive as having value.
Seed is the story of Bill Starr’s final days. Childless but with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and a nearly infinite web of extended family, Bill endeavours to empty his house completely before he dies by summoning distant relatives to claim their inheritance. Many of his letters go unanswered, but those who do appear show up only to find that their reward is often much less valuable than they might expect.
What they get instead are Bill’s memories, made vivid by each item from the past, memories that are more exotic and curious than the lives currently lived by his young relatives.
Accompanied by his housekeeper, Ramona, and his handyman, Jonathan, Bill is a somewhat cantankerous, wildly intelligent, and often forgetful man who recalls and speaks to his passed wife, often thinking that she’s not dead. His unwillingness to recognize what has happened to her and to give away his only possession of any value, a 1937 Pierce-Arrow automobile that they bought together, becomes the measure of his grief and of his love in this profoundly funny novel that faces death and love sincerely.
Seed is the story of Bill Starr’s final days. Childless but with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and a nearly infinite web of extended family, Bill endeavours to empty his house completely before he dies by summoning distant relatives to claim their inheritance. Many of his letters go unanswered, but those who do appear show up only to find that their reward is often much less valuable than they might expect.
What they get instead are Bill’s memories, made vivid by each item from the past, memories that are more exotic and curious than the lives currently lived by his young relatives.
Accompanied by his housekeeper, Ramona, and his handyman, Jonathan, Bill is a somewhat cantankerous, wildly intelligent, and often forgetful man who recalls and speaks to his passed wife, often thinking that she’s not dead. His unwillingness to recognize what has happened to her and to give away his only possession of any value, a 1937 Pierce-Arrow automobile that they bought together, becomes the measure of his grief and of his love in this profoundly funny novel that faces death and love sincerely.
Stanley Crawford was born in 1937 and is a graduated of the University of Chicago, USA and the Sorbonne, USA. He is the author of several novels, among them Petroleum Man, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine, Travel Notes, and Gascoyne, as well as the memoirs A Garlic Testament: Seasons on Small New Mexico Farm and Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico. He is coproprietor with his wife, Rose Mary Crawford, of El Bosque Garlic Farm in Dixon, New Mexico, USA.
