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Discussion Topics for Last
Call
Reading Groups, Book Clubs, & Classes
K. L. Cook welcomes and encourages reading groups, book clubs, and writing
and literature classes to read Last Call. He is happy to answer
questions about the book and/or visit with groups—in person or via
email, the internet or teleconferencing. Feel free to contact him
for more information.
- How do the events in the Nature’s Way section of the book
cast a long emotional shadow over this family? What kind of multigenerational
legacy does the mother’s mysterious disappearance in "Gone" create
for Laura, Gene, Rich, Gloria, Manny, and for their children?
- Some
of the characters in Last Call are deeply rooted to a sense of place,
while others attempt to escape from the place they consider
home
in order to
reinvent themselves. What do the stories have to say about our emotional,
psychological, even spiritual attachments to particular places and
our yearning for, as Laura
says in the final story, "a place to belong"?
- National
Book Award-finalist Jean Thompson said, "The stories
in Last Call are about fractured families, lovers and losers
(often one and the same)
and coming of age the hard way." Do you agree? Is the Tate
family fractured? Who are the lovers and losers, and are they "one
and the same"?
What does it mean to come of age "the hard way"? How
are the experiences of Laura, Travis, and Lee—the three young
protagonists—similar,
and in what ways are they different?
- In the Nature’s Way section,
the mother abandons her family. In "Last
Call," Travis says, "my mother and I had been fumbling
to protect each other. It struck me at that moment as a futile
thing to be doing. How
strange it was to think that you could ever protect someone else."
In the Pool Boy section, Lee struggles with the burden
of having to
protect and rescue his mother, sister, and father, a burden that
continues to haunt him,
as he says, "more than a quarter of a century later." What
do the stories in Last Call tell us about our responsibilities
toward others—family,
friends, and loved ones? What are the emotional and psychological
consequences of rescue, for both those doing the rescuing and those
being rescued?
- "This idea of not being who you set out to be or even who you think
you are," Lee says in "Pool Boy," "startled
me then, made me wonder if I had any inkling who I was, if in
twenty years I would look
back on this time and not recognize myself or, worse, not care.
If, like a snake, or a molting insect, I would outgrow this person
and become someone
different." Many of the characters in the book are preoccupied,
some even obsessed, with the issue of identity and self-knowledge.
To what degree
do we shape our own identities, and to what degree are our identities
shaped by experience and circumstance? Can we ever unlock the
mysteries of others,
even those we love and know best? Do we ever fully understand
ourselves, or is the self fundamentally dynamic and therefore
illusive? Is there
a core self
that is always identifiable?
- The epigraph for Last Call comes
from Zoo Story, a play by Edward Albee: "I
have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves,
independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves;
and I have learned that the
two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion."
In what ways do the individual stories and the collection as a whole
dramatize this?
- Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon
said, "A
group of linked narratives can
create an effect you can’t
get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series
of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning
to them again and again. The
interest lies in what has happened in the interstices." How
are the stories in Last Call linked? In what ways are
the stories self-contained,
and in what
ways are they connected to the other stories in the collection?
In what ways are the different sections thematically and dramatically
interconnected?
(Visit the Linked Stories section
to read more about linked stories, short story cycles, and novels-in-stories.)
Also in this section…
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