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The Practical Heart

Four Novellas

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The Practical Heart

Written by: Allan Gurganus
Narrated by: Dan Cashman
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About this listen

 In his fictional Falls, North Carolina–a watchful zone of stifling mores–Allan Gurganus’s fond and comical characters risk everything to protect their improbable hopes from prejudice, poverty, betrayal. Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while creating a rarely-glimpsed world of valor, minor grandeur, side-street heroics.

Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted grand-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and 18th-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths–sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming–from human hearts as immense as they are local.©2001 Allan Gurganus; (P)2001 Books on Tape, Inc. Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Short Story

What the critics say

"This collection places Gurganus in the pantheon of America's best storytellers...These stories may all arise from Gurganus's Carolina home soil, but their messages are universal in scope. Highly recommended."
-- Library Journal


"The four novellas that make up The Practical Heart recall the four chambers of the organ that gives this collection its name. . . . Each of these first-person accounts of outsiders keeps readers guessing with unexpected twists. . . . The book's knotty prose, dense with description, is the perfect vehicle for these intricate yarns. Gurganus is a gifted storyteller--always surprising, entertaining and, finally, enlightening."
--Time Out New York
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