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The Tiki King: Stories
The Tiki King: Stories
The Tiki King: Stories
Ebook191 pages3 hours

The Tiki King: Stories

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A Lebanese housewife, a former horror-film maker, and a cantankerous Russian librarian are among the inhabitants of the offbeat world found in this impressive debut collection. Stacy Tintocalis’s stories take us from a defunct women’s shelter off a Missouri country road to the streets of low-income Hollywood, where her characters yearn for the love that is always just out of reach.

The title story explores the conflicted emotions an adolescent boy feels toward a father who obsessively returns to his childhood home. In “Too Bad about Howie,” a divorced poet finds comfort in stolen moments with his ex-wife’s dog. Despite their longing for connection, these characters are victims of their own foibles, trapped in terrifying moments of psychic violence that risk driving away the very people they love.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 16, 2010
ISBN9780804040426
The Tiki King: Stories
Author

Donald C. Pfanz

Donald C. Pfanz is a Civil War historian and author of Abraham Lincoln at City Point and War So Terrible: A Popular History of the Battle of Fredericksburg.

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    If there is a theme to the stories in this collection, it would have to be disconnection. The characters in The Tiki King fail to connect in almost every story, from an old insomniac resisting the advances of a woman who walks into his apartment by accident, to a dressmaker who refuses to sleep with his wife. Sometimes the affection is non-sexual, as in the case of a teenage boy who lives in a universe caught between his two parents or a divorced man who misses his dog and sneaks over to his ex-wives’ place to spend time with him.

    Tintocalis takes you on a tour of the ugly and unkind side of humanity where people are left wanting love with no way to get it. Like the characters, I often felt I too was left out in the cold when the last sentence was read, wondering why, clutching nothing but air.

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The Tiki King - Donald C. Pfanz

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