American Holidays

American Holidays embraces the range of contemporary American life, from day trading and multi-level marketing schemes to road rage and suburban bigotry. In the tradition of story collections such as James Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories offer piercing, witty, and often humorous glimpses into the lives of ordinary people as they celebrate, or sometimes ignore, each of ten distinctively American holidays. It's all here in this marvelous debut collection from Rob Driscoll: the frustrations of a single father trying to please everyone but himself one Halloween night, the slovenly neighbor who takes a notion to clean up his yard on Memorial Day, an urban gang that makes one too many intrusions on a man's peace one Labor Day weekend, a handicapped child's Independence Day revolt and triumph on the little league field, a stockbroker's Election Day brush with violence in his insulated suburban world, and more. A hundred years from now, these stories will provide an accurate picture of life in the suburbs and cities of America at the end of the twentieth century.