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WORK TITLE: West
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.carysdavies.net/
CITY: Lancaster
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Australian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Wales.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, both 2015, both for The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories; also received V.S. Pritchett Prize, Royal Society of Literature, Olive Cook Short Story Award, Society of Authors, Northern Writers’ Award, Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award, William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Prize. and Cullman Fellowship from New York Public Library.
WRITINGS
Also author of Creed (novella), 2017; contributor to anthologies, including Loss & Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories, selected by Victoria Hislop, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2013; and New Welsh Short Stories, edited by Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Anne Thomas, Seren (Brigend, Wales), 2015. Contributor to periodicals, including Daily Telegraph, Dublin Review, Granta, Guardian, Head Land, London Evening Standard, Love, Marie Claire, Ploughshares, Royal Society of Literature Review, Stinging Fly, Sunday Telegraph, and London Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Welsh-born writer Carys Davies won widespread recognition in 2015, when her second collection of short stories, The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories, was recognized with the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. That was only one among many of the recognitions the author has received. Davies, wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s eponymous home page, the Carys Davies website, “is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award, [and] a Northern Writers’ Award.”
The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories
Critics had high praise for Davies’ collection, noting the volume’s diversity of subjects and its unique vision of some of the darker places in the human soul. “Its subjects span the world,” explained Alison Flood in an article appearing in the London Guardian that announced Davies’ reception of the Frank O’Connor Award, “with stories set everywhere from a remote Australian settlement, where a young wife has a secret, to a Colorado jail, where a Quaker woman meets a condemned man in his final hours in the title story.” That story, “The Redemption of Galen Pike,” ends with the unrepentant Pike’s execution—and the “redemption” may have less to do with the title character and more to do with the future of the woman who meets and interviews him on the day of his death. “This sophisticated collection,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “observes that everyone contains multitudes, and people’s darkest corners are what make them interesting.”
Reviewers also found much to praise in Davies’ effective use of language. “Davies relies for her effects on what remains unsaid: She forces her reader to pay close attention and frequently to fill in the blanks in stories that often circle around their central subject without alighting on it directly,” wrote Steven W. Beattie in the Toronto Globe and Mail. “This requires a deft hand and superb control, and Davies evinces both; the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike are tiny marvels of technique and language. They often traffic in dark material…. Yet the notion of redemption persists, not just in the title story, but also in the collection as a whole, which ends on an unexpected note of hope.” “While the collection lacks a strong coherent thread the stories all explore elements of a shared human experience and the intensity that can exist there,” declared Maeve Murray in the Coal Hill Review. “Davies’ voice is unique and present throughout her stories; she often employs long sentences uninterrupted by commas or other punctuation to achieve a rushed effect. In this she is very successful. Her observations of the human condition … reflect an author who shows great promise.” “What these stories do have in common, however,” asserted Stephen Finucan in the Toronto Star, “is an overwhelming sympathy for what it means to be human; an understanding of the fear, doubt, and sorrow that we all face — and of the hope, too, that urges us on.”
West
Davies’ first novel, West, is set in nineteenth-century America. “Davies is always interested in the obsessional, the deluded even,” stated Eibhear Walshe in the Ploughshares Blog, “and here, the central character, Cy Bellman is no exception. In mourning for his dead wife Elsie, he leaves his young daughter Bess and his mule farm in Pennsylvania to the cold mercies of his sister Julie to pursue a folly…. Adult folly, negligence bordering on suspected pure malice, and lust lurks everywhere in this tale.” Bellman had already migrated from England to Pennsylvania in search of a better life; his wife’s death gives him the excuse he needs to follow his desires (in this case, to find ancient dinosaurs or mastodons still living in the American wilderness) even if it comes at the expense of Bess’s future. The author “conveys the simultaneous ridiculousness and-nobility of Bellman’s obsession,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “which compels this Don Quixote in a stovepipe hat to leave his daughter.”
Critics found Davies’ novel just as intriguing as her short stories. “West has the wisdom and lyrical prose of a folk tale whose power grips the reader from the beginning and demands a single-session read. A short novel, deceptively simple, it tells two tales of life at home and away whose symmetrical dangers are presented in stark terms,” asserted Sarah Gilmartin in the Irish Times. “Carys Davies moves easily between the lives of her leading characters – widower Bellman and his daughter Bess – to show perspectives of an ancillary cast, each of whom intrigues in their own right.” “Davies,” declared Poornima Apte in Booklist, “precisely captures the spirit of untamed curiosity and middle-aged ennui that would have us abandon established societal norms.” “Davies’ economical approach, in the form of short chapters and concise prose, is incredibly effective,” said BookPage reviewer Langston Collin Wilkins. She offers just enough narrative for the reader to connect with characters.” “Overall,” asserted Walshe, “West … marks Davies’s successful expansion of her imaginative vision.” “Deployed on the stage of the mid-lapsarian American frontier, Davies’ chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “A masterful first novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Poornima Apte, review of West, p. 30.
BookPage, May, 2018, Langston Collin Wilkins, review of West, p. 20.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), May 19, 2017, Steven W. Beattie, review of The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories.
Guardian (London, England), July 8, 2015, Alison Flood, “Frank O’Connor Award Won by ‘Truly Original’ Stories of Carys Davies.”
Irish Times, May 5, 2018, Sarah Gilmartin, review of West.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of West.
Publishers Weekly, February 27, 2017, review of The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories; February 19, 2018, review of West, p. 47.
Toronto Star, May 19, 2017, Stephen Finucan, review of The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories.
World Literature Today, September-October, 2017, review of The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories, p. 67.
ONLINE
British Council, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/ (June 20, 2018), author profile.
Carys Davies website, https://www.carysdavies.net (June 20, 2018), author profile.
Coal Hill Review, http://www.coalhillreview.com/ (July 18, 2016), Maeve Murray, review of The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories.
Ploughshares Blog, http://blog.pshares.org/ (April 20, 2018), Eibhear Walshe, review of West.
Text Publishing website, https://www.textpublishing.com.au/ (June 20, 2018), author profile.
Novels
West (2018)
Collections
Some New Ambush (2007)
The Redemption of Galen Pike (2017)
Novellas
Creed (2017)
Carys Davies is the author of a novel, West, and two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Born in Wales, she lives in Lancaster in northwest England.
Carys Davies
FictionShort Stories
Publishers:
Granta Publications
Biography
Carys Davies is the author of a novel, West, and two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers’ Award, and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Bibliography Awards
Bibliography
2014
The Redemption of Galen Pike
2007
Some New Ambush
Awards
2015
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
2015
Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize
Carys Davies is the author of Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, published in one volume by Text as The Travellers and Other Stories. She won the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born in Wales, she lives in Lancaster in northwest England.
Carys Davies is the author of a novel, West, and two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike, which won the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She is also the recipient of the Royal Society of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, a Northern Writers’ Award, and a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Her short stories have been nominated for many other awards, including the Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Prize. They have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Granta, The Dublin Review, Head Land, Love, Loss & The Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories, New Welsh Short Stories, Ploughshares, The Royal Society of Literature Review, and The Stinging Fly. Her non-fiction has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Granta, The Guardian, The London Evening Standard, Marie Claire, the Sunday Telegraph and The Times. She has curated the short fiction programme at Lancaster Litfest, given talks and taught writing at universities, festivals, literary salons and libraries across the UK and in Ireland. Recent festival appearances include the Cork International Short Story Festival, the London Short Story Festival, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, the Vancouver Writers Festival, and York International Women's Festival.
Born in Wales, she grew up there and in the Midlands, lived and worked for eleven years in New York and Chicago, and now lives in Lancaster in northwest England.
Frank O’Connor award won by 'truly original' stories of Carys Davies
The Redemption of Galen Pike takes €25,000 prize for the year’s best short story collection
Alison Flood
Wed 8 Jul 2015 17.21 BST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.58 GMT
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Carys Davies said she was ‘delighted, grateful, and completely astonished’ Photograph: Jonathan Bean
The Welsh author Carys Davies has won the Frank O’Connor international short story award for her second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike.
The €25,000 (£18,000) prize, the world’s most lucrative for a single collection of short stories, has been won in the past by some of the genre’s biggest names, including Haruki Murakami and Edna O’Brien. Davies, who now lives in Lancaster, beat writers including the American authors Karen E Bender and Tony Earley, and the British writer Kirsty Gunn, to win this year’s prize.
Her collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, is published by the small UK independent press Salt. Its subjects span the world, with stories set everywhere from a remote Australian settlement, where a young wife has a secret, to a Colorado jail, where a Quaker woman meets a condemned man in his final hours in the title story.
“Galen Pike’s crime revolted Patience more than she could say, and on her way to the jailhouse to meet him for the first time, she told herself she wouldn’t think of it; walking past the closed bank, the shuttered front of the general store, the locked-up haberdasher’s, the drawn blinds of the dentist, she averted her gaze,” writes Davies. “She would do what she always did with the felons; she would bring Galen Pike something to eat and drink, she would sit with him and talk to him and keep him company in the days that he had left.”
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The Irish novelist Éibhear Walshe, part of the judging panel for this year’s prize, called it “a truly original and striking collection, full of funny, keenly observed stories replete with twists and turns that surprise”.
Davies, Walshe said, was a “remarkable voice”, adding: “The language is economical with not a word to spare. Davies takes historical moments and themes and examines them in novel ways which intrigue the reader.”
The author pronounced herself “delighted, grateful, and completely astonished” to win the prize, which is sponsored by Cork city council and by the school of English, University College Cork.
Patrick Cotter, award director, praised Davies as a “gifted writer”, and her press Salt as “a small independent, gritty publisher which has been dedicated to the short story for over a decade, often publishing more short story titles in a year than the imprints of major international conglomerates”.
WEST
Langston Collin Wilkins
BookPage. (May 2018): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
WEST
By Carys Davies
Scribner $22, 160 pages ISBN 9781501179341 Audio, eBook available
Welsh author Carys Davies' masterful debut novel, West, tells the story of Cy Bellman, a widowed British transplant raising his young daughter, Bess, in rural Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. When Bellman reads about the discovery of mammoth-size bones in Kentucky, he begins to feel discontented and restless. The bones captivate Bellman. He wants to see them in person and believes they belong to creatures that still roam the earth. He also needs a break from his mundane and rather depressive existence. Despite warnings and condemnation from family and neighbors, Bellman decides to head west, beyond the Mississippi River, in search of more mysterious fossils.
Davies juxtaposes Bellman's journey with the story of Bess, whom he leaves behind in Pennsylvania. Deprived of a mother and a father, Bess faces the perils of life without stability and protection. She spends much of the story waiting for her father while attempting to avoid the nefarious attention of two local men.
While they are living two disconnected lives, Bellman's and Bess' stories intersect through the travels of a Shawnee youth named Old Woman from a Distance, who serves as Bellman's guide on his western journey. Orphaned by both tribe and homeland, Old Woman from a Distance is a curious boy who is searching for his own type of contentment.
Davies' economical approach, in the form of short chapters and concise prose, is incredibly effective. She offers just enough narrative for the reader to connect with characters and engage with the plot. But from chapter to chapter, Davies leaves much unsaid, which in turn leaves the reader feeling as vulnerable and full of wonder as the book's main characters.
West is an engrossing work of historical Action grappling with themes of vulnerability, longing and hope that transcend all contexts.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilkins, Langston Collin. "WEST." BookPage, May 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055050/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=153fb2ea. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537055050
Davies, Carys: WEST
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davies, Carys WEST Scribner (Adult Fiction) $22.00 4, 24 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7934-1
In the early 19th century, a man quests into the American West and finds a world teetering between extinction and dreams.
A decade or so after the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Cyrus Bellman, a widower and mule breeder, reads in the newspaper of the discovery of "monstrous bones...sunk in the salty Kentucky mud" and is convinced that "the same gigantic monsters still [walk] the earth in the unexplored territories of the west." Promising to write frequently, Bellman leaves his preteen daughter, Bess, on his Pennsylvania farm and heads west. What follows is the story of Bess' waiting and Bellman's wandering; the story of the letters Bellman sends and their unlucky eastward journeys; the story of Bellman's guide, "an ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance" and whose tribe--after being harassed by settlers and paid off in trinkets--has recently undertaken its own less-voluntary western migration. Bess dreams of her father's return while struggling to evade the predatory attentions of two local men. Bellman, a soft-spoken Ahab, suffers winters "harder than he'd thought possible" yet remains enthralled by "the notion that...there were always things...you hadn't dreamed of." Old Woman From A Distance is at once "angry about the past, but ambitious for the future" and must eventually decide whether to undertake a quest of his own. Welsh author Davies' (The Redemption of Galen Pike, 2017, etc.) slim, complex, and achingly beautiful first novel is a sculpture of daring shifts and provocative symmetries welded together by lyrical, fast-paced prose. Davies dispenses with troublesome thousand-mile wildernesses in a sentence and dashes between the minds of both principal and ancillary characters. The result is a choral performance, reminiscent of those by Penelope Fitzgerald: The reader enjoys a story far greater in its sweep and better-linked in its causes than any of that story's participants can appreciate. Deployed on the stage of the midlapsarian American frontier, Davies' chorus manages to weave threads of myth and hope into the gnarly chords of historical tragedy.
A masterful first novel--the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Davies, Carys: WEST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248273/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e796f1cc. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248273
West
Poornima Apte
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p30+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* West. By Carys Davies. Apr. 2018. 160p. Scribner, $22 (9781501179341).
You might argue that John Cyrus Bellman is going through a midlife crisis. After all, what would possess a widower with a young daughter, Bess, to leave her behind with her aunt and embark on a seemingly improbable mission across the great American plains, hoping to come across the monster animals he has only read about? News of discovered fossils only adds fuel to his fire, and John sets off on an increasingly perilous journey, befriending a scrawny and clever Shawnee boy. Set in the early nineteenth century, Davies' slender first novel has all the heft of a sprawling western classic. As John's and Bess' paths increasingly diverge, his goals seem like a mirage. "He began to feel that he might have broken his life on this journey, that he should have stayed at home with the small and the familiar instead of being out here with the large and the unknown." In a tightly knit, compulsively readable tale, Davies precisely captures the spirit of untamed curiosity and middle-aged ennui that would have us abandon established societal norms and everything we hold dear only to follow our hearts to uncertain outcomes.--Poornima Apte
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "West." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 30+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250876/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63eacf7d. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250876
West
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p47+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
West
Carys Davies. Scribner, $22 (160p) ISBN 9781-5011-7934-1
In her transfixing first novel, Davies (author of the story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike) tells a stark story about exploration and extinction on the American continent. Driven by wanderlust to leave his small British village, Cy Bellman sets up a mule farm in rural Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Reports of the discovery of large fossils in the Kentucky mud, "bones ... that were bleached and pale and vast, like a wrecked fleet or the parched ribs of a church roof," kindles his imagination more than his farm's jennies and jacks: "it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened." Davies conveys the simultaneous ridiculousness and-nobility of Bellman's obsession, which compels this Don Quixote in a stovepipe hat to leave his daughter to determine whether mammoth beasts still wander the nation's vast western expanse. Bell's Sancho Panza is a teenage Shawnee orphan girl hired to guide the strange man in his search. Their haphazard, perilous, and occasionally dreamlike traipse is mesmerizing, as is the complex relationship that develops between the two. Though the ending may come across as formulaic, it is nonetheless dramatically satisfying and doesn't detract from this otherworldly novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"West." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 47+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357487/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=582b2752. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357487
Carys Davies: The Redemption of Galen Pike
World Literature Today. 91.5 (September-October 2017): p67.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Carys Davies
The Redemption of Galen Pike
Biblioasis
Australian author Carys Davies pieces together this collection of short stories with a myriad of characters from all over the globe, detailing their experiences with suffocating isolation. Davies explores each new environment with a precision of language that fully fleshes out the unique environment of every story and makes the characters dynamic and compelling in such a short space.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Carys Davies: The Redemption of Galen Pike." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, 2017, p. 67. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502351919/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fb187f08. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502351919
West by Carys Davies review: a morally complex novel
West has the wisdom and lyrical prose of a folk tale whose power grips from the beginning and demands a single-session read.
Carys Davies, author of ‘West’
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, May 5, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, May 5, 2018, 06:00
Buy Now
Book Title:
West
ISBN-13:
978-1783784226
Author:
Carys Davies
Publisher:
Granta
Guideline Price:
£12.99
“You had so many ways of deciding which way to live your life. It made his head spin to think of them. It hurt his heart to think that he had decided on the wrong way.” Noble wanderer Cyrus Bellman reflects on his decision to leave his 10-year-old daughter at home on his Pennsylvania mule farm to go in search of a possibly extinct animal whose bones have been found in the “salty Kentucky mud”. That Bellman will never find his precious mammoths lends a tragic tone to this beautifully written debut novel from the outset of its ill-fated journey.
West has the wisdom and lyrical prose of a folk tale whose power grips the reader from the beginning and demands a single-session read. A short novel, deceptively simple, it tells two tales of life at home and away whose symmetrical dangers are presented in stark terms.
Carys Davies moves easily between the lives of her leading characters – widower Bellman and his daughter Bess – to show perspectives of an ancillary cast, each of whom intrigues in their own right.
Predators
In 1815 Frontier America, predators are everywhere. Bellman, a man “educated, to a point”, sets off on his journey with two guns, a hatchet and a knife. As he bids farewell to Bess and heads into the wilderness beyond the Missouri River, his hopes for survival rest with his guide, “an ill-favoured, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance”. Documenting the beginning of the bloodshed for Native American tribes, as settlers relieve them of their lands, the novel establishes the white man as both explorer and plunderer.
From the settler perspective, the natives represent danger and death: “Bess’s father would be lucky to have got past St Louis before being scalped and murdered by angry Indians.” A masterful line from Davies sums up the view from the other side: “Like a dark, diminished cloud, they had moved west across the landscape away from what had been theirs.”
Middleman Devereux, who organises Old Woman as a guide, notes in a description that has overtones of Shylock’s great speech in The Merchant of Venice that the Indians are “generous and loyal, treacherous and cunning, as weak as they are strong and as open as they are closed. That they’re shrewd and hopelessly naive, that they are vengeful and mean and as sweet and curious as little children.” It is a striking passage that shows the Native Indian people as vividly human even as the character tries to paint them otherwise.
Insights
West is brimming with such observations and insights, from the pathos of Bellman’s letters to Bess getting “scattered like leaves across the soil”, to the vinegar that spinster aunt Julie washes the windows with at home. As a year turns into two, with no word from the explorer, Julie looks after Bess but her protection is no match for two local men who stalk the child like huntsmen biding their time.
Young Bess uses her wits to escape from a lecherous librarian in a way that makes the second predator all the more horrific. Devious farmhand Elmer Jackson has had his eye on Bellman’s farm since the beginning. His covetousness quickly turns sinister, related in disturbing detail by Davies: “She is a perfect little thing – reminds him of milk, or cream, cooling in the shed, a silken chill when you dip your finger but a soft warmth inside. Oh dear God, for a taste.” Later sections use an even more alarming shorthand: “Elmer Jackson watched Julie go.”
Davies is an acclaimed short story writer whose second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2015. From Wales, the author has also won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchett Prize and was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
Her debut novel is in the American realist tradition, mixing fable and social reality to stunning effect. Although his novels are set a century later, Steinbeck is an obvious comparison, both the journey west in The Grapes of Wrath and the coming-of-age narrative of The Red Pony that sees a young protagonist awaken to the dangers of life and the infallibility of adults. A more recent comparison is Katy Simpson Smith’s evocative historical debut The Story of Land and Sea, which has an equally moving father-daughter relationship at its core.
The way Davies brings her two tales together is both innovative and inevitable, with a fairytale twist that is more Grimm than Disney. Although set centuries ago, her morally complex novel has an immediacy that lands us in frontier America, a brave new world with ever present danger. “Remember, there are no gods,” says Old Woman in the novel’s closing section. “We have ourselves and nothing else.”
The Redemption of Galen Pike
Carys Davies. Biblioasis (Consortium, U.S. dist.; UTP, Canadian dist.), $14.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-77196-139-4
More By and About This Author
Former journalist Davies’s second collection of short stories, following Some New Ambush, is a perfectly formed gem that won the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award after it was first published in the U.K. The 17 stories travel across multiple continents and range over several centuries, and each whisks readers into the orbit of a different character—people whom readers might ordinarily dismiss as uninteresting. Often surprising, these stories contain nothing so unsubtle as a twist but instead ambush readers with tiny details and revelations that shift everything they thought they knew. The title story does this wonderfully when the reader’s assumptions about Patience Haig, a seemingly worthy prison visitor, are quietly and satisfyingly up-ended. Another story, “Miracle at Hawk’s Bay,” shocks with its unexpected treatment of a gruesome death. This collection has a deliberately formal feel that makes even the contemporary stories seem timeless. Davies has an enviable talent for creating entire internal universes for her characters; her spare prose and somewhat elliptical style give her enormous control over both characters and readers. This sophisticated collection observes that everyone contains multitudes, and people’s darkest corners are what make them interesting. The book never falters in its delicate touch and confident, nuanced observations about the human condition. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Apr.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 02/27/2017
Release date: 04/11/2017
Paperback - 144 pages - 978-1-907773-71-6
Ebook - 176 pages - 978-1-77196-140-0
Book Review: THE REDEMPTION OF GALEN PIKE by Carys Davies
July 18, 2016 by admin ·
The Redemption of Galen Pike
by Carys Davies
Salt Publishing, 2014
£9.99
Reviewed by Maeve Murray
Carys Davies’ second short story collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, is unique and exquisitely human. It dives deep into the lives of not-so-everyday people in very few words, yet capturing the experience entirely. Davies is a rare talent capable of narrating a plethora of voices with clarity and skillful ease.
The collection opens with a story called “The Quiet,” which aptly sets the tone for the stories that follow. “The Quiet” centers on the idea that sometimes strangers have much more in common than they think or want to believe. Protagonist Susan Boyce is wary of her neighbor, Mr. Fowler, because of the way he looks at her and seeks her out. Immediately readers are led to believe that Mr. Fowler’s intentions are less than honorable, but in fact he has seen something in Susan that reminds him of himself, a pain they both suffer, quietly. When their common burden is revealed, the final paragraph expertly shapes the emotion readers are left hanging with:
She took his small brown hand and lifted it to her cheek and closed her eyes like someone who hadn’t known till now how tired they were, and then she asked him, would he help her, please, to dig the hole.
With this final line, readers need no further explanation. Every detail Davies planted along the way created a landscape of vivid feeling that was achieved without once naming the emotions of her characters, and it is brought to a close neatly with Susan’s quiet acceptance of her bond with Mr. Fowler.
Other stories are less complex, such as “Bonnet” or “Myth,” but are no less well-crafted. In “Bonnet,” a woman changes the color of her bonnet lining in the hopes of garnering more attention from the man she secretly loves. In “Myth,” we see the startling perspective of a woman who is losing a breast, willingly, to appease her Amazonian Queen. But even these simpler narratives capture tenderness, in “Bonnet,” Davies writes:
For a moment, he is speechless—all he can do is stand there looking at her and wishing that he could tell her something, the future perhaps… but he knows nothing of her future – nothing that could come now to her rescue or to his… and he says nothing about the bonnet and neither does she but it is the worst imaginable thing for her to sit and feel the bright new silk around her face, like a shout, and see how embarrassed he is, how he can’t look at it.
These moments are staples in Davies’ writing. Her ability to so fully capture complex emotions in very few words is indicative of an award-winning author. The namesake of the collection, “The Redemption of Galen Pike,” is equally extraordinary. A convicted man is due to be hanged, and in the short time before his sentence is carried out, he is visited daily by Miss Haig, who brings him biscuits and talks to him. Their interactions are not inspiring, but rather dark, grounded, capturing the grit of such a time before a man dies, not pulling excessive redeeming qualities to light or shuffling through snapshots of a life wasted, in ways that a lesser story might employ. What Davies does instead is show readers exactly the bad person Galen Pike is, exactly the hopeless case Miss Haig may be. There is no shining light at the end of this tunnel, but that doesn’t mean redemption is out of reach. Life for Miss Haig carries on after the death of Galen Pike, and it is not unchanged. Pike’s redemption didn’t come from a standard good act in his own life, but the lasting effect his character had on the life of Miss Haig.
While the collection lacks a strong coherent thread the stories all explore elements of a shared human experience and the intensity that can exist there. Davies’ voice is unique and present throughout her stories; she often employs long sentences uninterrupted by commas or other punctuation to achieve a rushed effect. In this she is very successful. Her observations of the human condition, well-crafted stories, emotionally powerful sentences, and overall unique experiences on the page reflect an author who shows great promise.
The short story is magnificent and unpredictable in The Redemption of Galen Pike
By Stephen FinucanSpecial to the Star
Fri., May 19, 2017
In “The Quiet” — the opening story in Welsh-born Carys Davies’ powerful new collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike — a lonely homesteader’s wife in the Australian outback finds herself the unwanted host to a menacing neighbour while her husband is away in town. The “small and sun-wizened and ugly” Henry Fowler has arrived empty-handed, bringing nothing but his “scrawny-looking” self and the whiff of threat. For Susan Boyce, it “felt like the worst thing in the world to her, him looking at her the way he did.”
The set-up here is pitch perfect, the sense of foreboding palpable. Some awful thing is surely going to happen, and indeed some awful thing does happen — only it’s not at all the awful thing that one might have expected.
The Redemption of Galen Pike, by Carys Davies, Biblioasis, 176 pages, $17.95. Uploaded by: Deborah Dundas (Biblioasis)
Welsh-born Carys Davies has penned a powerful new collection of 17 short stories, titled The Redemption of Galen Pike. (John Minihan)
The Redemption of Galen Pike, by Carys Davies, Biblioasis, 176 pages, $17.95. Uploaded by: Deborah Dundas (Biblioasis)
Welsh-born Carys Davies has penned a powerful new collection of 17 short stories, titled The Redemption of Galen Pike. (John Minihan)
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And, quite simply, this is Davies’ strength: the unexpected. Not a single one of the seventeen stories that make up this magnificent book is predictable — not even in their unpredictability. Each — whether it be about the sea offering up a fisherman’s corpse to a town full of bereaved widows, the odd request made to a mysterious Haitian nanny to her Yuppie employers, or a wearied Queen Victoria who, during her tiresome jubilee celebrations, just wants to be told something interesting — each is singularly unique.
Neither does Davies allow herself to be bound by geography. The pieces here range widely, from the Welsh countryside to the frozen barrens of Siberia, from the forests of Westphalia to the rugged Colorado frontier town of Piper City in the collection’s compelling title story. Time periods, too, wander, from Greek antiquity to the days following 9-11.
What these stories do have in common, however, is an overwhelming sympathy for what it means to be human; an understanding of the fear, doubt, and sorrow that we all face — and of the hope, too, that urges us on.
It’s little wonder that Davies was winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a prize previously given to the likes of Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami and Edna O’Brien. The Redemption of Galen Pike is a stunning achievement, and Carys Davies a writer to celebrate.
Stephen Finucan is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Toronto.
The Redemption of Galen Pike - Carys Davies
STEVEN W. BEATTIE
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MAY 19, 2017
UPDATED MAY 19, 2017
Barrelling Forward
By Eva Crocker
House of Anansi Press, 264 pages, $19.95
The Redemption of Galen Pike
By Carys Davies
Biblioasis, 176 pages, $17.95
In her debut collection, Newfoundland's Eva Crocker favours story titles with words that imply activity or motion. In addition to the title story, there is Dealing with Infestation, Auditioning, Serving and All Good, Having a Great Time.
By comparison, Welsh writer Carys Davies tends more toward elliptical titles, many of them encompassing only a single word: Jubilee, Myth, Bonnet, Precious, Creed. If we may assume that writers choose their titles with great care, we may also consider that the different approaches here speak to the kinds of craftspeople we will encounter in these collections, and to the different tone each one employs.
Even before cracking their covers, these two collections signal different characteristics. Crocker's features a brightly coloured abstract painting, with pinks and oranges and yellows streaking across the horizontal-like waves: motion again, and an indication of vibrant feeling. The cover of Davies's book is a sickly green, with an illustration of lips spread open to reveal crooked, painted teeth that also appear as though they are rotting. The title of Crocker's collection implies movement, and an attitude of abandon: The specific verb "barrelling" connotes freedom and some degree of chaos. "Redemption," by contrast, is more abstract, tilting in the direction of an idea rather than an action.
This notion is solidified in Davies's opening story, appropriately titled The Quiet. Right from the first sentence – "She didn't hear him arrive" – Davies solidifies her approach, which accentuates technique and style over action. The opening sentence of the story both recapitulates the concept in the title and provides a signpost for what lies ahead. There is no clarification as to whom the pronouns in the sentence refer: Right out of the gate, Davies plunks the reader down in an unfamiliar, unknown location and faced with two anonymous figures, one of whom is deprived of a key sense impression (a limitation that is likewise downloaded onto the reader).
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The following paragraph similarly refuses to identify our two protagonists, preferring instead to fill in environmental details such as "the rain … thundering down on the tin roof like a shower of stones" and "the scrape of his iron-rimmed wheels on the track, the soft thump of his feet in the wet dust." It is not until the third paragraph – which, like the first, comprises a single sentence – that we are given the name of one of the characters, Henry Fowler. We are also told that "she hated it when he came."
The opening gambit in Crocker's Dealing with Infestation, by comparison, is more concrete and straightforward: "There was a semi-finished apartment below the place Francis was renting and it sucked all the warmth out of his home." Specific details in the sentence – not least of them Francis's name – provide grounding, and we are immediately situated in a recognizable place and scenario. Unlike Davies's brief, five-word opener, Crocker's first paragraph sprawls out to a languorous 110 words, replete with concrete signifiers that help further embed the reader in the context of Francis's damp, shivery apartment: "The cold made his sheets and pillowcases feel wet; each night he clenched his teeth as he slid his hand into the frigid space between his pillow and the mattress."
Crocker's style – accessible and reader-friendly, heavily reliant on dialogue – proves more familiar than that of Davies, who prefers withholding pertinent information and injecting an element of mystery into her short, intriguing tales. Even when things become clear – often not until the closing moments of a given piece – there is usually an element of surprise or ambiguity attached.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Redemption of Galen Pike's penultimate story, Nothing Like My Nightmare, which is composed of a single, 187-word paragraph. Davies's astounding microfiction features an unnamed, first-person protagonist imagining all the ill fortunes that might befall a female traveller – student? new hire? – flying to a school in a different country. The imaginings run the gamut from the mundane ("she'd lose her passport or her glasses or run out of anti-bacterial handwash") to the outlandish ("her plane would crash, exploding in a ball of black fire somewhere high above the mountains"). When the final moment occurs, the reader is floored both by its unexpectedness and the literary legerdemain that allows Davies to carry off such a reversal in so short a space and without ever providing clarifying details about the situation or the relationship between the speaker and the traveller.
Here, as elsewhere, Davies relies for her effects on what remains unsaid: She forces her reader to pay close attention and frequently to fill in the blanks in stories that often circle around their central subject without alighting on it directly. This requires a deft hand and superb control, and Davies evinces both; the stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike are tiny marvels of technique and language. They often traffic in dark material: the couple in the opener share a murderous bond arising out of a mutual history of abuse; the brief microfiction Myth focuses on the possibly apocryphal idea that Amazon warriors had one breast amputated to increase their aggressiveness in battle; and the title story features a woman who visits a condemned man in a Colorado jailhouse. Yet the notion of redemption persists, not just in the title story, but also in the collection as a whole, which ends on an unexpected note of hope and uplift.
The stories in Barrelling Forward are more conventional, cast in the mode of kitchen-sink realism and focusing on dissatisfied characters straining at the bonds of their situations. Francis in Dealing with Infestation is a milquetoast teacher who blows his chance at connection with a female colleague not as a result of the possibly infectious scabies rash he exposes her to, but because he is too meek to stand up for her in a staff meeting. The Landlord, one of the collection's standout stories, features a woman whose desire to be liked backfires at her job and in her living environment, where she finds herself subject to the unwanted sexual advances of the greasy, detestable owner of the rental she shares with a roommate.
The frankness and energy in Barrelling Forward are the products of youthful exuberance, but there is a paradoxical sense that we've been here before: This terrain has been covered by other writers, in much the same way. By contrast, The Redemption of Galen Pike feels startlingly original, in part precisely because of the restraint the author exhibits. Davies's technically accomplished, glancing tales offer the frisson of the unexpected; by the end of Crocker's collection, one is left echoing the assessment of a supercilious teacher in the opener's ill-fated staff meeting: "All very dramatic."
Steven W. Beattie is reviews editor at Quill & Quire and writes a monthly column on short stories for The Globe and Mail.
West by Carys Davies
Author: Eibhearwalshe |
Apr
20
2018
Posted In Book Reviews, Fiction
West book cover in a repeated patternWest
Carys Davies
Scribner | April 24, 2018
Amazon | Powell’s
In her 2014 short story collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, the fictional world of Carys Davies revealed itself as having a satisfyingly gothic texture, sharp, poignant and utterly original. Each of the seventeen (very short) short stories were rewarding, partly for her style—precise, cleanly written, no words wasted—but also partly for her startling use of various historical settings. Some of the stories were set in Victorian England, with Queen Victoria herself making an appearance in “Jubilee.” “Bonnet” features another emblematic figure from Victorian England: the novelist Charlotte Brontë; the story turns on her attraction towards her handsome younger publisher George Smith and her purchase of a new pink bonnet, bought just at the moment when he announces his engagement to another woman. A story of only a few pages, but like a poem, an entire relationship, its hopes and fears, all center on this new pink bonnet, soon to be abandoned in grief.
Even in this earlier collection, nineteenth-century America attracted Davies’s attention and imagination, as can be seen in the wonderful title story, “The Redemption of Galen Pike,” with its bizarre and satisfying twist at the close. Now in her first novel West, like the latest novel of the Irish writer, Sebastian Barry, Days Without End, she uses the American West and the opening of the frontier as a setting. Davies is expanding her range with great success and a deft skill in terms of building narrative and suspense. This is a short novel at 148 pages, more like an expanded novella, and her challenge here is to maintain the powerful concentration of her earlier stories within a broader canvas. Mostly, in West she succeeds, particularly in the tightly woven climax of the story and the violent resolution in the face of danger and destruction. Davies is always interested in the obsessional, the deluded even, and here, the central character, Cy Bellman is no exception. In mourning for his dead wife Elsie, he leaves his young daughter Bess and his mule farm in Pennsylvania to the cold mercies of his sister Julie to pursue a folly. (Although Julie was perhaps underdeveloped and with no clear backstory as to her reasons for keeping her niece from school or indeed her own journey to Pennsylvania in the first place, her function was more as an adjunct to her niece’s threatened fate and her negligence is one of the stronger elements within the novel.) Adult folly, negligence bordering on suspected pure malice, and lust lurks everywhere in this tale.
There is a pathos and also an infuriating self-indulgence to one of the protagonists, Cy, obsessed with finding lost dinosaurs, rumors of which abound in the lands beyond the Mississippi. The novel follows his crazed and potentially doomed journey while providing a parallel account of his young daughter left abandoned, lonely, uneducated, and in increasing danger from the predatory men around her as she grows older. The journey that Cy embarks on draws from Davies an impressive imagining of the frontier landscape and of the dangers and perils of each season, where the suicidal folly of Cy’s journey becomes apparent. As he wanders on his impossible quest, accompanied by a young Native American boy, picturesquely dubbed Old Woman from A Distance, seeking his lost giants and writing home to his daughter, the neglect of the young Bess becomes the focus of the other strand of the novel. There is a kind of desperation in the young girl’s increasing isolation and her longing for her lost father, and the unknowability of her future becomes the strongest element within the narrative. A parallel bid for survival by the two young protagonists, Bess and Old Woman from a Distance, attempting to survive in a cruel or dangerous adult world, drives the novel. Davies’s landscape is superb here in its clean simplicity: “He marvelled at the beauty of his surroundings: the pale gray ribbon of the river; the dark trees; in the distance the bright spread cloth of the prairie, undulating and soft; the bruised blue silk of the sky.”
The pacing of the novel is a key strength and I found myself racing to finish it, indeed, managed to do so within an hour of picking it up, partly because of its sparse, controlled clarity but also because of the dramatic intensity of the final scenes, when the two young protagonists come together unexpectedly. Overall, West fulfils the originality and the vision of The Redemption of Galen Pike and marks Davies’s successful expansion of her unique imaginative vision from the short story to the (short) novel.
About Author
eibhearwalshe
Eibhear Walshe was born in Waterford, studied in Dublin, and now lives in Cork, where he lectures in the School of English at University College Cork. He has published in the area of memoir, literary criticism and biography, and his books include Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life, (2006), Oscar’s Shadow : Wilde and Ireland, (2012), and A Different Story: The Writings of Colm Tóibín (2013). His childhood memoir, Cissie’s Abattoir (2009) was broadcast on RTE’s Book on One. He is Director of Creative Writing at University College Cork, Ireland