Moira Crone
Moira Crone was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and educated at Smith College and Johns Hopkins. Her short stories have appeared in The Ohio Review, Washington Review of the Arts, Gallimaufry, and elsewhere. She edits Numen, a magazine of contemporary writing, and teaches in the Department of English of the Louisiana State University.
The Winnebago Mysteries and Other Stories
Here are the necessary exorcisms of a young writer, performed with a swift surgical precision that allows for a glimpse of the depths right through the cuts. Unsentimental, hard hitting and charged, this is language at work.
The Winnebago Mysteries and Other Stories
Moira Crone
1982
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-0-914590-69-9
In this collection of seven short stories, Moira Crone presents fresh writings about women, love, and strength. “Kudzu” is a tale of a girl’s childhood in the stranglehold of American life. “The Brooklyn Lie” deals with a young woman’s sexuality and body. The title story explores relationships and women’s issues through a series of letters and narratives.
“Every typical family at first represents merely an animal connection, as it were, a single organism. Cast back upon itself, it cannot get beyond itself. From itself, it cannot create a new individual and to try to do so through the education within the family is a kind of intellectual incest.” — Franz Kafka
“The whole family, in a rolling house, can have a new backyard every night.” — From a radio commercial for Winnebago Homes and Rollin’ Out Recreational Vehicles, Inc., in Highsville, NC
Moira Crone’s fiction is full of lovely surprises. Her Winnebago Mysteries is a pure delight.
Moira Crone’s collection is about love. She expresses strength of feeling for both the form she has chosen, and for the people whose lives she celebrates, commemorates. Although this is not a trendily anti-male book, it is surely about women, and it is strong and interesting in that regard. The prose is powerful because restrained, poetic while serving Crone’s affection for narrative. The book abounds not only in awfully good stories, but in wonderful sentences, lines I want to remember. A novella, “The Winnebago Mysteries,” is a fine extended piece, with terrific humor — dark and bright, sad and funny, at once. This book introduces an important young writer; paying attention to her is, at the very least, a great pleasure.