The Great Petrowski: A Fable

by Gina Berriault

In this ecological fable, a parrot wanders a modern city lonely and homesick for a place he can barely recall. Original.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published May 30, 2000

About the author

Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was absolutely worth the read, I'm a huge lover of reading any type of folklore/fable/mythology adjacent books, especially if it's ends up getting inspired they end up in the future It might not have made sense during the first read, but I'm okay with rereading more often to see if I understand things significantly better.

[KarlaC · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this little book up at a library sale many years ago. It stayed on my shelf all this time. I was digging around for something to read, found it, and decided I might as well give it a try.
This was written 23 years ago about the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. People and the parrots have been fighting to stop it for that long. Sadly, they are losing that fight.
This little fable was very choppy. The storyline was all over. But I could follow along. I won't be keeping this book, but passing it on to the local used book store.