Must I Weep for the Dancing Bear, and Other Stories

by Louis Phillips

These stories by Louis Phillips reinforce his reputation throughout his dozens of books of being imaginative, incisive, and entertaining. The voice here is that of a young man, sometimes a teenager and sometimes a college student, who is learning about life and about work. Phillips captures these formative years brilliantly, creating a coming-of-age collection of stories that will take you back to your own youth. The characters change from story to story, but they consistently look at the world with a naïveté and an innocence which exude great humor, great pathos, and great curiosity. These stories are not to be missed.

165 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2012

Reviews

[Tad Crawford]

These stories, many of which originally appeared in literary journals, reprise the experience of being young in the south of the 1950s and 1960s. Phillips is a masterful spinner of stories that develop fully fleshed characters with the capacity to surprise and rend the schisms and depths of our own hearts. The visual iconography--of a race track where the fix is in, a carnival with the dancing bear of the title (and perhaps naked women grinding behind the veil of a tent), or a movie theater where the head usher wears a cape to make himself the Black Messiah--recall a time almost out of mind before digital delivery to large screens and big box stores that wiped out the gritty individuality of small entrepreneurs. Race relations, religion, and nuclear terror all play a role in these coming of age stories. And the coming of age is not only of the southern youths who populate the stories but of the country as well. The concluding story has a different tone from the others, more personal, dialectical, confessional as it discusses the assassination of President Kennedy. From that watershed event emerged a before and after, a lost hope and innocence that we who lived in that time will never forget. This is a powerful grouping of stories that make for a very pleasurable read.

[S.C. Parris]

Nice short stories, all about growing up, but often through the loss of something, be it an idea, a wrong choice, sometimes death, loss of relationships, loss of pride...etc. Gives the overall book a rather dark, but real tone.