부산대학교 도서관

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.