What Goes without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen

by Josephine Jacobsen

"Josephine Jacobsen gives us a startling word-by-word gift. Her characters -- human and animal -- know edginess and exhilaration. She is unfoolable. Her judgment is lyric, wise, and daring. She looks all around, her angle of vision invariably original, able to switch from the periscopic to the circumferential."--The 1995 National Book Awards The recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows," she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid," an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies." Praise for Josephine "Unlike the predominant shrillness, vagueness, or opacity of the contemporary scene, Josephine Jacobsen's work is marked by its reserve, stoic timbre, and its high precision."--Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky "Josephine Jacobsen writes masterfully, consistently, and better every year. She has a superb narrative gift and she sketches the people of her world with originality, inventiveness, and rare intelligence."--Nation

Genres: Short Stories

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 1996

About the author

Josephine Jacobsen was an American poet, short story writer, and critic.

Born in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, she moved with her family to New York at a young age. When she was fourteen, she moved to Maryland where she lived for the rest of her life. Jacobsen served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress from 1971 to 1973 and as honorary consultant in American letters from 1973 to 1979. She served as member of both the literature panel for the National Endowment of the Arts and of the poetry committee of Folger Library.

Reviews

[west20trees · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Late Fall" is one of the more stunning short stories I've read, and not just because of the way it ends. Jacobsen's stories about racial, class and gender dynamics played out on unnamed islands of the Caribbean are striking and extremely subtle (in spite of my rather blunt characterization of their thematic content). The last story, about a murder mystery, felt out of place because of it's heavy-handedness, or at least the visibility of the author's intent. I re-read this book whenever I need a lesson on the intricacies of structure and narrative.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Started reading with "A Walk with Raschid" -- devastating and beautiful and a honeymoon encounter with young boy in Fez. This Baltimore poet and short story writer was a treasure (now deceased).