The community's hidden complexities, however, rival those of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.Įach of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper's police blotter. In a city where the homecoming queen still makes the front page of the weekly newspaper, ducks caught in storm drains and stolen campaign signs make up the bulk of the paper's crime reports. These stories infuse stark reality with occasional hints of magical realism to explore what the American dream means to twenty-first-century suburbanites.

Reading these stories is, as one character observes, 'like seeing the town from the inside out, as if the lake was its heart and the rest merely its bones and skin.'.The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States. The Prisoner Pear offers a rare look inside the heart of suburban America. The lake at the center of town is a constant in the lives of this town's people, and it reappears throughout the book as a symbol of wealth and power, of love and loss. Her stories, both humorous and disturbing, probe beneath the clear, hard surface of a community into the murky depths beneath. Elissa Minor Rust fills in the background to these small, odd events - a headless parakeet found in a mailbox, a nude jogger, an alarmingly deathlike discarded teddy bear. Each of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper's police blotter. The community's hidden complexities, however, rival those of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

THE TWELVE STORIES IN The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States.

The Prisoner Pear by Elissa Minor Rust