β Scribed by Benjamin Taylor
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Tales Out of School is the story of the Mehmels, privileged and eccentric and headed into shipwreck, and of fourteen-year-old Felix, last of their line, who takes his rise from the family ruin. The place is Galveston Island. The season is summer. The year is 1907. Among the crowd of memorable characters in this novel are Lucy Pumphrey Mehmel, Felixβs mother, a woman torn between the Catholicism into which she was born and the Judaism into which she has married; Etta Murph, a sibyl in the guise of a tutor, Boston-married to Velma Truley, her faithful companion and scold of thirty years; Leo Mehmel, Felixβs bachelor uncle, amateur ornithologist and spendthrift of a rapidly dwindling inheritance; Nathan Gernsbacher, elderly rabbi of the town, who has lost all knack for the faith he avows; Peter Munger and Albert Roache, brave but dubious aeronauts, rough young men at work on a flying machine of their own design; lastly β and catalyst to them all β Yankel Schmulowicz, the uncanny stranger who turns up in Galveston to ply his mysteries, leaving nothing as it was before he came. Erotic as it is spiritual, homely as it is exalted, insistently comical as it is deeply sad, a book of lifeβs inevitable opposites, Tales Out of School establishes Benjamin Taylor in the forefront of serious contemporary fiction and testifies to a vivid potential in previously unexplored byways of the American heritage.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Tales Out of School is the story of the Mehmels, privileged and eccentric and headed into shipwreck, and of fourteen-year-old Felix, last of their line, who takes his rise from the family ruin. The place is Galveston Island. The season is summer. The year is 1907. Among the crowd of memorable charac
Newly married John Pickett is all too painfully aware of the gaps in his charity-school education. But when he pays a visit to his old schoolmaster, he learns a lesson he hadn't bargained on. This 3rd John Pickett short story falls between _Mystery Loves Company_ (Book 7) and _Peril by Post_ (Book 8
Contemporary legend says the business of high school is boring and must forever be that way—that its sole purpose is to deposit tidbits of knowledge into young minds and standardize the way each attacks the world. School Tales begs to differ. As is made clear by its five spunky student narrato
Contemporary legend says the business of high school is boring and must forever be that wayβthat its sole purpose is to deposit tidbits of knowledge into young minds and standardize the way each attacks the world. School Tales begs to differ. As is made clear by its five spunky student narrators, hi