TOY GUNS (Helicon Nine Press, 1999).

Available from Helicon Nine Press for $12.95 + shipping/handling.

WOMEN WHO SLEEP WITH ANIMALS (completed mss.)

TOY GUNS: Stories

-Blurbs
-Awards/Nominations
-Reviews
-Denver Post
-Library Journal
-Kansas City Star

Blurbs for Toy Guns

“All ten stories in this disturbing collection revolve around Americans’ passionate devotion to guns, gun-toting, sexually-tinged violence, and the womanly pursuit of power and dignity. From the trailer parks and working-class suburbs of Big Sky Country to vast Alaska and the jungles of the Philippines, these characters - and characters they are, most of them women, some of them girls - walk tightropes. They move through shadows and the dimly lit edges of love, family , marriage and other at-risk relationships. With a sharp eye for irony and the bizarre, the author of these troubling stories lays out a clear, compelling vision of how we live right here and now.” –Al Young, judge

“In Toy Guns, Lisa Norris’s striking debut collection, real dangers occupy the perimeters of all the characters’ lives, and violence - both emotional and physical - is only a heartbeat away. In each wrenching story, we see an America out of control, in love with war; we recognize ordinary people unsure of what to do with tenderness, with their own needs and desires. Finally, we witness, through Norris’s sure and subtle narrative control, the shrinking of perimeters until the dangers lie inside the characters themselves. Toy Guns is smart, fresh, frightening, and ultimately exhilarating.” - Tracy Daugherty

“There are boundaries, and there are those who dare cross them. Lisa Norris is a true literary fence-cutter. Toy Guns is a lively, intrepid book, as wise and harrowing as the American it chronicles.” - Alyson Hagy

“In Lisa Norris’s stories, the world most of us know is rendered with loving precision; people much like those we know have their engagingly realized lives. And yet, as familiar as the territory seems, moments of extreme tension, often violent, rise form the everyday surroundings to test the characters severely. It sometimes turns out that one or another of these characters have been even more severely tested before; noticing this, I see that most of us have been. This is a terrific book.” - Henry Taylor

Nominations/Awards
Toy Guns was…
- winner of the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction prize
- nominated by Joyce Carol Oates for a Pushcart Prize.
- included as one of the Kansas City Star’s Books of the Year (3 Dec 2000).
- chosen as a Sept-Oct “pick” by the Small Press Review, 2000.

and was reviewed in . . .
Ms. April/May 2001
Connections. Fall 2000: 34.
Roanoke Times & World News. 21 January 2001: Horizon 6.
Time Out New York. 30 Nov.- 7 Dec. 2000: 25.
Publishers Weekly. 16 Oct. 2000.
Kirkus. Fall 2000.
Library Journal. November 2000.
Kansas City Star. 29 Oct. 2000.
American: Magazine of American University: 30.
Ruminator Review. Winter 2000-2001: 25.

Reviews of Toy Guns

Denver Post review link: http://extras.denverpost.com/books/toy0121.htm

Violence calls the shots in short stories
By Freddy Bosco_Special to The Denver Post
Toy Guns_By Lisa Norris _Helicon Nine, 142 pages, $12.95

Jan. 21, 2001 - Our culture, equipped as it is with every manner of weapon, was constructed with the possibility of a large measure of violence. Lisa Norris, therefore, has both eyes trained on us. A writer capable of commercial-quality fiction, Norris took 12 years to assemble her collection of short stories, “Toy Guns,” and in it she looks at the impact of violence on women in our culture.

In “Toy Guns,” which won the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize, Norris’ protagonists blend softness with large measures of horror and harsh outcomes. Many of the paperback heroines respond with incredulity to handguns, shotguns and other implements of destruction. As often as mute passivity characterizes the responses of these women, sometimes we find an outspoken indictment on the part of the author.

Norris sees her characters thrust into hopeless situations with a virtual placing of innocent fingers on triggers. She manipulates her subjects deftly, barreling them through impossible circumstances to explosive outcomes, which frequently leave a character reeling from the shock of their violent capabilities, whether they were victims or perpetrators.

Norris presents her thesis in a rich variety of situations, ranging from Virginia to Alaska and the Philippines. Every story, from the scientist who kills ducks to the women who find themselves stranded on a snowy road, comes from a unique perspective. No two stories resemble each other.

The author comes from a life experience of many hats, each worn, we presume, in dead earnestness, that she could now show us a mirror in which we see the small but horrifying ways in which we both express and tolerate violence.

Something in our national character, from the subtle violence of Ellis Island to the blowout of Hiroshima, dances with death in a way that expresses our valuation of life. We have come not only to absorb the horror, but also come to expect it in our daily lives. The pope tours Mile High Stadium in a bullet-proof capsule and we think nothing of it. Our politicians and celebrities live in dread of assassination.

We take small steps toward limiting the proliferation of weapons even as we supply the world with arms. It takes someone as brave as Norris to put on a spectacular display of our relationship to the violence we live with in the smallest of ways. Her characters take on large meaning in the context of the author’s thesis.

One person can only do so much, but Norris has done the work of many.

Freddy Bosco is a Denver-based freelance writer.

Copyright 2001 The Denver Post. All rights reserved._This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
__________________

Library Journal
Life is dangerous in Norris’s first collection, which won the 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. There’s no safety even for the innocent, like Joe in “Prisoner of War,” who ends up in the middle of some war games while hiking near his home, or Anna and Beth in “Black Ice,” who take a ride in the mountains and get caught in an ice storm. In the title story, a toy gun leads to a confrontation; in “Stray Dogs,” a young girl lies and steals after being followed by a stray dog; and in “Interior Country,” a woman fleeing her abusive husband ends up witnessing a murder. In the ironic “Trailer People,” a researcher receives consolation from the people being studied, and in “Swimming,” an extra marital affair leads to disaster. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver, these ten stories have a powerful impact that keeps reverberating long after you finish reading them. Highly recommended.–Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

November 20, 2000, Review from the Kansas City Star by John Mark Eberhart

The trouble with didactic fiction is that the message sometimes overshadows the art. Once in awhile, though, the writer gets the balance exactly right, and the result can be as engaging as it is instructive.

Lisa Norris gets it right with Toy Guns, her debut collection of short stories and the winner of Helicon Nine Editions’ l999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. Norris is fearless in her exploration of a disquieting subject: The almost casually brutal propensity for violence in contemporary American life. But she does it without sacrificing striking narratives and intriguing characters.

‘Interior Country,’ the opening tale, is a sort of ‘Thelma & Louise’ story without the romanticizing. Two women, both victims of a world of loutish, savage men, meet up in Alaska - and confront, in themselves, the very thing they profess to fear and hate. ‘I’ve been knocked around all my life,’ says Roxanne, armed with a firearm but perhaps no longer armed with her sanity. ‘I don’t mean to be knocked around no more,’ she tells Cory, a younger woman whose timidity Roxanne seeks to shatter by forcing her to face some terrible realities.

‘American Primitive’ uses events and images far less explicit than a gun-toting woman on the loose in Alaska, but it’s still a devastating story. Betsy, a young American girl, trembles in fear of ‘headhunters’ while traveling through the Philippines with her family. But the real enemy is within, personified by her drunken, insensitive father and a mother perhaps too submissive to step in and stop her daughter’s suffering.

One of the finest stories of the collection, though, is ‘Prisoners of War,’ in which a disabled, retired bookstore owner meets up with a group of thuggish young men playing paintball war games in the Idaho mountains. Is this really an ROTC training session, or is there a more malign force at work here, perhaps a hate montering militia group? Norris builds dramatic tension out of the ambiguity while simutaneously commenting on the difficulty these days in discerning good in any kind of violence, government-sanctioned or not.

‘Black Ice,’ the 10th and final story in the book, turns a simple road mishap in wintry conditions into a metaphor for survival and kinship.

Norris, who lives in Virginia, has written not only a great first book, but also a great book, period. Once again, the Kansas City-based Helicon Nine has discovered a fine new literary voice.

*******************************

Women Who Sleep With Animals is Norris’s second, yet-unpublished collection of nine realistic, often humorous, stories in which women negotiate intimate relationships with human and non-human animals. The protagonists are biologists, retail salespeople, wives, mothers, and lovers. They have the problems of ordinary people—disease, disability, infidelity, aging and loss—but extraordinary moments (e.g., a bear charging the biologists who study her, a woman finding herself in the company of her husband’s lover at a sex toy party) lead to moments of revelation

Five of the stories have already been published or are forthcoming in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Review, Rambler, Terrain.org, Ascent, and Blueline.