Michigan State University Press | Detroit Tales

| | | | | | |

Jim Ray Daniels

Jim Ray Daniels is the Thomas Stockman Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published numerous collections of short stories. Daniels won the Best Regional Fiction Gold ...

Click here for more information.

Detroit Tales

Jim Ray Daniels

Winner in ForeWord Magazine's 2003 Book of the Year Awards: the 2003 Bronze Medal for Short Stories was awarded to Jim Ray Daniels for DETROIT TALES.

The stories in Detroit Tales are tales about urban, working- class America. People struggle both to remain in the city and to escape the city. The three central motifs of this collection are the city, the workplace, and the automobile. In their cars, people negotiate the territory between work and home. Conflicts arise in the characters’ impulses to veer off their well-worn paths. What can they do? Where can they go? What forces pull them away, and what forces pull them back? The characters search for what can provide spiritual sustenance. Often, the relief from the drudgery of their daily lives is provided in the fleeting dazzle of fireworks or Christmas lights, but they take what they can. If these stories have one unifying theme, it is that escape is not the answer. When the pulls of friendship and love and personal responsibility draw us back to our ordinary homes and our ordinary jobs, we must trust those pulls, and we must lead those lives with as much dignity as we can muster.

"Jim Daniels' work is strong, direct, with a contemporary validity...." - Gwendolyn Brooks

Praise for Detroit Tales

“Jim Ray Daniels looks at the same gritty world as the rest of us, but sees something altogether different—the treachery of domesticity for one thing. He knows, as Tolstoy knew, that the ordinary life is the most terrible, the most heartbreaking, and the most compelling. The stories in Detroit Tales are both disturbing and subversive, asking us to question everything we believe in and count on. The language is bold and poetic, the vision clear and unflinching. When I finished the book, I was rattled to realize that there is nothing so frightening, so unsettling, as a life sharply observed.”

—John Dufresne, author of Deep in the Shade of Paradise

“Jim Daniels writes with grace and unsentimental sympathy about ordinary, hard- edged lives, their celebrations and failures and strivings. There is a world of dreams beneath the skin of even the toughest city. Detroit Tales maps it beautifully.”

—Jean Thompson, author of Wide Blue Yonder

Michigan & Great Lakes Books

World Rights
280 pp., 6.00" x 9.00", 2003
Paper, $22.95,

0-87013-662-3
978-0-87013-662-7

| | | | | |