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    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella
    Unavailable
    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella
    Unavailable
    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella

    Written by David Gates

    Narrated by Lesa Lockford and Eric Michael Summerer

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Gates's characters, young or old or neither, are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living - or assisted-dying - facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. Terrifyingly self-aware, they refuse to go gently - even when they're going nowhere fast, in settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast to the countryside upstate and in New England.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781633799844
    Unavailable
    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a Novella
    Author

    David Gates

    David Gates lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was an editor at Newsweek, where he specialised in music and books. He is the author of two novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls, and the story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World.Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Paris Review and Granta.

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    Reviews for A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

    3.5/5

    3 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me by David Gates is comprised of a novella and eleven short stories, each written about events that could easily be read as non-fiction, however this is indeed fiction. Gates’ writing style is unique and while I prefer a more lengthy writing style, it did not take me long to become accustom to his more choppy, short sentenced style. The eleven stories along with the novella are interesting, however the stories are neither uplifting nor inspiring, rather more about the affects of poor life choices by mainly intelligent and well off characters. I never felt a connection to any of the characters, however I did enjoy the stories, at least as well as one could enjoy self-destructive stories of individuals and families. A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is the first work I have read of Gates’ and I will definitely look into his other works. As far as this collection of short stories goes, if one enjoys short stories and is prepared for a less than cheery read, this may be the book for you.
    • 3/5
      These are not happy little stories. Not that stories need to be happy, of course, but these are depressing in the “this is how life is” kind of way. These are upper class people, for the most part- academics, artists, writers, architects- all people who are well educated. These are people who read Shakespeare to unwind and are too high brow to watch TV- even public TV. These are also people who are very self-aware, which makes you wonder why they continue with their self-destructive behaviors, knowing where it will lead them. For these are people who seem to be all about sex and drugs and alcohol- but no rock and roll; they listen only to classical. Or perhaps some early jazz. They never met an impulse they didn’t like, and they follow through on them pretty much every time. A lot of the main characters are fighting against aging, and the disappointment of not having lived the lives they feel they deserved. They will not go gently into that good night; they will go staggering and slurring, with bottles of Viagra clutched in their hands as they reach for the next young sexual conquest, talking wittily the whole while. The stories are arranged in a progression; they work their way through sex, to drugs and alcohol, and finally make it to illness and death. Only the last story-the title story, the death story- ends on a hopeful note, with people acting for the long run rather than the immediate impulse. The characters are nearly interchangeable story to story; person who fails in their profession, aging person trying to hold back time by having sex with younger people, person who has spouse but can’t resist having sex with other people, person who drinks too much/does speed/does heroin/smokes too much pot. I suppose the point of the stories is that we’re all, even the most respected of us, animals when it comes down to it. The stories may be devoid of likable characters, but they are brilliantly written, rather as if noir was written by intellectuals. I think the self-awareness of the narrators makes the stories different from most. They compel a person to keep reading; it’s like being held by a tale at a cocktail party, held by an ancient mariner in tweed.