- Title: Annihilating Distance: Selected Stories
- Author: David Vigoda
- Publisher: Collioure Books
- Form: Paperback
- Illustrated: ---
- Number of Pages: 288
- ISBN: 0-9728250-5-3
- Price: $15.95 + $5.00 (Shipping) = $20.95
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Annihilating Distance:
Selected Stories
by David Vigoda
“I
always told him,
if
he kept writing he’d succeed.”
—Abe Vigoda
Description, Summary, Contents
Reviews, Comments
Selections
Table of Contents
About the Author
DESCRIPTION, SUMMARY, CONTENTS
Nephew of the famous actor, David Vigoda is a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship winner.
Whether from next door or from history, Vigoda’s characters come right at you. In thirteen thrilling stories, circumstance forces them to decide what they most believe in and how they will behave—and to confront the implications. Deeply imaginative and passionate, the stories combine the excitement and pleasure of popular novels with the subtlety and seriousness of literary fiction. “My writing is like sushi,” quips Vigoda, “sophisticated and raw, with subtle flavors.
“The stories’ subjects range widely. In Rebels an enigmatic man abducts a prostitute to the woods, in Outlaws
a half‑crazed loner is undone by an ecological disaster. Prisoners
depicts an old world intellectual revolutionary, while Strangers follows the return of an ostracized poet to his
totalitarian nation. Exhalations of the
Intellect describes the birth of genetic engineering, Against Us, Tyranny fictionalizes events in the lives of French
writers. Finally, Toward the Annihilation
of Distance centers on homegrown terrorism.
REVIEWS, COMMENTS
“Vigoda’s stories are deftly told and poetically rendered, full of the
anxieties and small joys that characterize the everyday moments of human
contact. Annihilating Distance is a
terrific read.”
—Michael
Bernard‑Donals, Professor of English, University of
Wisconsin‑Madison
“David Vigoda’s stories stand out from other contemporary
writing: he’s more interested in truth, ethics, and the moral relation of art
to life. And in politics, experienced individually. His voices are real, the
ideas important, the sentiments intimate. We recognize things about ourselves
we’ve glimpsed, but never seen so well as we do through Vigoda’s precise
lens. We need to read these stories—to enjoy, and to learn.”
—Arthur
Devenport, Lecturer in Liberal Arts, The University of Chicago.
“These learned and rich stories are dark and wry as the dialog
poems of Robert Frost. They are full of the cruelty that drives the human in
crisis, and they have the poet’s love of the natural web. Reminding one of
Whitehead’s definition of the Romantic, they are all protesting on behalf of a
world pulsing with value, but always blocked in bloody fights of power and
tyranny, greed and betrayal.”
—David
Shapiro, author of A Burning Interior
(Overlook Press).
”Annihilating Distance
illuminates issues shared with authors like Dostoevsky and Maupassant, Zola and
Camus by linking them to their contemporary disguises. These impressive stories
situate the reader with the author as witness, intent on discovering and making
visible the relevance of moral and ethical concerns in a post‑9/11
world.”
—Julie
Gutmann, Assistant Professor of Literature, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
SELECTIONS
from Rebels:
As she came around the car he leaned over to open the door, leaned over again to lock it once she was inside, his arm across her like a safety bar, and stared at her, stared at her face, from that close. He stared at her eyes, into her eyes, at her eyebrows and eyelashes, at her cheeks, her lips, her hair, his face blank, like you would examine a photograph of someone interesting. Was she interesting, this unflinching unblinking ‘let me know when you’re through’ teenager, her face smeared so thick her make‑up made a mask, her lips made large with red, her eyes with black?
from Strangers:
After they had clinked glasses and tested the first sip, he turned away. “I like your friends,” he mumbled, “but I barely know them. They’re so young.”
”They’re
as old as I am.”
“That’s
what I mean,” he said turning back.
She
took his glass away and put it and hers on the table. “We’re lovers,” she
whispered, fixing his eyes. “Lovers have no age.”
from Zola, A Fiction:
Zola sits, suspended in time and place, unaware as yet that he has been struck by flying glass and is bleeding. He feels nothing and sees little, though he will claim to remember an intense alertness. His sole specific memory will be that of the face of one of the assailants..., a face profoundly unconscious of itself, contorted... into a mask, a repulsive version of itself. Though in five minutes Zola would be unable to identify the man in a group, he will later confide to Fasquelle that he will carry the vision of that face to his grave.
from Toward the Annihilation
of Distance:
Beyond where the plow had
stopped, a four‑wheel drive had cut neat tracts into the deep snow on the
road, just wide enough for the sled. The child climbed on with wordless
excitement and they set off alone into an untouched white world. Before them the
road rose several feet, shortening the view, so there were no sweeping vistas.
The world was intimate, a silent, a white birth world. The trees, empty of all
clutter, took only the snow to their undefended arms.
The
stranger turned back to the tree to watch the liquid roll off the tap into the
bucket. Truly, she felt to her gradually increasing amazement, there was
something wonderful about this whole experience. A secret had been discovered.
While she had been shivering and cursing at the mud, the earth was silently
waking up. Looking at the dripping sap, she suddenly felt the entire woods as
something living. For her whole life she could have walked through it or around
it and never have... felt part of it. Now here she was, inside looking out, for
the first time.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
From Rebels Outlaws Spies Dreamers Prisoners Strangers
Rebels
Outlaws (Homage to Dostoevsky)
Prisoners
Strangers
From Exhalations of the Intellect
Doing the Right Thing
The Goddamn Stuff of Life
Make A Wish, Joan
From Against Us, Tyranny
Zola, A Fiction
Saint Camus
From Toward the Annihilation of Distance
Prologue
I Autumn Morning Child Tree
II Winter Afternoon Man House
III Spring Evening Stranger Bird
IV Summer Night Woman Rock
Epilogue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
David Vigoda writes: Life is astonishing; writing is the best way I know
to ponder it. The primary theme or feeling that runs though my work is the
experience of distance. Yet my fundamental belief is in the possibility of
constructive change and so I have sought to infuse my work with the
counter‑theme to distance, which is the struggle to overcome it. I can’t
help ruminating about what’s wrong with the world and what might be done to
make less of a mess of things. I don’t recall when the phrase ‘the
annihilation of distance’ first occurred to me, but it was many years ago and
it still encapsulates for me the essential human task. Not all my protagonists
succeed, but most of them try.
I grew up in New Jersey and received a BA degree from the University of
Chicago in 1968. In Chicago I was active in the civil rights and
anti‑Vietnam War movements. Demoralized, I left the US in 1969 with my
wife of one week and went to live in London, later in Israel. Having had plays
produced in Chicago and London, I decided to get a Ph.D. in playwriting and to
get it at the University of Utah. Big mistake. I was unable to complete the
program, but while there wrote the play for which I was later awarded a writing
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and admitted to membership
in PEN American Center.
Now a father, the three of us moved to ‘Cold Mountain,’ a farmhouse on
a mountain west of Albany, New York. My first novel, Nucleus, attracted a New York agent and publisher; the next two, Call
Me By My Name and Back Door to
Paradise, remain unpublished. I also wrote a radio play that was broadcast
on National Public Radio.
Nine years later we moved closer to Albany, where I began writing short
stories (in series). Other works include Plinth,
an abstract short novel (incorporating photography and advertising) about the
loss of meaning and Family Values, a
television pilot developed in collaboration with my uncle, Abe Vigoda, which
received a staged reading in New York. Currently I’m working on a novel
(working title: Re-enchanting Nature
or Twelve Days) about the clash
between science and sacredness. I write the “Why It’s Great” newsletter
and direct the “Why It’s Great” writing workshop.
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