George Angel
George Angel was born of Columbian parents in San Francisco, California, in 1964. He spent his first thirty years in and around San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California. He studied at the University of California and in 1991 received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His work appears in such magazines as Caliban, Exile, Sulfur, Fiction International, The Iowa Review, Chelsea, The Quarterly, and Quarterly West, as well as the anthology Transgressions (University of Iowa Press, 1994). He has co-edited the magazines Satchel and Orchard. He currently lives in Medellin, Colombia.
The Fifth Season
What Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult” makes these gnomic, powerful pieces frequently as rewarding as they are challenging.
The Fifth Season
George Angel
1996
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-016-7
Hardcover
ISBN 978-1-57366-015-0
These texts are territories, dark forests, places to dwell. Sheets of language superimpose and recurrent words and images begin to fall upon one another like the bricks or sticks of an imagined palace waiting to be explored. Where is this palace? Somewhere on an island between San Francisco, California and Medellin, Columbia. This palace is empty, the builder has left. But one can hear a melody drifting down its halls.
If you have a little time, if you are one of the readership’s unabashed children, take up your flashlight and enter this attempt to whistle things as they are, simultaneous and spiraling, full of leaves and laughter, women walking doodles in the morning, confusion as fusion considered, and the breeze that lifts us up into the trees.
A first collection, winner of the Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction, consisting of brief, Beckett-like distillations of psychic experience. Angel’s strange, demanding stories, set—when settings are specified—in the Latino subcultures of southern California, pay as much attention to geometrical shapes and architectural designs as to the emotional states which they appear to influence and with which they dreamily correspond. Images of enclosure and extension thus resonate through such obscure yet seductive stories as “Home” (which registers visions that may go through a drowning man’s mind) and “Carl’s World” (which memorably relates a hospital janitor’s complex apprehension of human vulnerability and mortality). What Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult” makes these gnomic, powerful pieces frequently as rewarding as they are challenging.