From Publishers Weekly
The paperback release of Canin's thoroughly engaging short-story collection-a PW bestseller and one of PW's best books of 1994-marks the launch of the Picador imprint in the U.S. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Four stories from Harvard Medical School graduate Canin, author of the fine collection Emperor of the Air ( LJ 2/1/88).Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
If one were to diagram Canin's fictional form, it would have to be of classical proportions: clean, noble, and golden. His latest book presents us with four beautifully told long short stories. In each, a man muses over his past and realizes how little control he has had over pivotal moments in his life. "Accountant" is a gripping variation on the turtle and the hare fable. The turtle, and narrator, is Abba Roth, a serious student turned dutiful accountant. The hare is Eugene Peters, Roth's academically disinclined boyhood friend who was able to parlay his enthusiasm for auto mechanics into a hugely lucrative business. Now solidly middle-aged, they have a showdown of sorts at a fantasy baseball camp overseen by none other than the great Willie Mays. As Roth surprises everyone with his able performance on the field and incredible awkwardness everywhere else, he finally gives into his deeply buried "impulse for uproar and disorder." The title story also tells the tale of a methodical, even fussy man brought up short by the bold, unscrupulous acts of richer and more powerful figures. In each story, Canin proves himself adept at articulating moments of profound embarrassment followed by flashes of self-knowledge that are either invigorating or demoralizing. Moving and memorable. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
Canin's return to short fiction should be a cause for welcome- -yet isn't, disappointingly. In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues--as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)--to strive for ``wise'' adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable--turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme--that we repeat as adults what we do as children- -each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In ``Accountant,'' an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In ``City of Broken Hearts,'' a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in ``Batorsag and Szerelem,'' a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate ``kid-brother'' writer)--and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide. The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes--an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Marvelous...Each plot is dramatic, its characters highly engaging, the suspense sustained and irresistible...A commanding performance."-The New York Times

"Extraordinary for its craft and emotional effect...a writer of enormous talent and charm." -The Washington Post

"These four long stories are not only splendid reading material; they are stunning art, the kind if art that, blessed with an adamant yet unadorned intelligence, capers at the edge of life's deepest mysteries." -The Dallas Morning News

"Superb."-Time

“Masterful...[Canin is] a keen and compassionate talent. His writing is cut of whole cloth; it is beautiful and it wears well.” —New York Daily News


Book Description
Academy Award winner Kevin Kline stars in the adaptation of the title story in this collection in a Universal Pictures release directed by Michael Hoffman (Restoration)

The Palace Thief is the story of a dedicated and inspiring classics professor at an elite prep school where an encounter with a student, the son of a powerful senator, inexorably alters his life. Forty-one years later at a reunion of his students, he is faced with the fear that he may have failed the most important challenge of his life—to have been a great teacher.


About the Author
Ethan Canin is the author of Emperor of the Air, For Kings and Planets,and Carry Me Across the Water, among other books. A former physician, he is now on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Academy Award winner Kevin Kline stars in the adaptation of the title story in this collection in a Universal Pictures release directed by Michael Hoffman (Restoration)

The Palace Thief is the story of a dedicated and inspiring classics professor at an elite prep school where an encounter with a student, the son of a powerful senator, inexorably alters his life. Forty-one years later at a reunion of his students, he is faced with the fear that he may have failed the most important challenge of his life--to have been a great teacher.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Canin, whose short-story collection Emperor of the Air was justly feted, as his novel Blue River was not, here offers four brilliant longer stories, each seamlessly structured and with prose and characters to linger over. The book's ostensible theme is Heraclitus's observation that character is fate, which is all well and good until we try to understand the meaning of either term. Take Mr. Hundert, the honorable boys' school teacher who in the title story tries to make sense of a student's rise from a cheating dullard to an industrial and political leader. As for the question of character, hardly does a protagonist gain a slippery hold on the essence of another person's character, when a forced self-evaluation occurs: in ``City of Broken Hearts'' a recently divorced man considers his son as alien but in fact, the youth is the one person who sees through--and redeems--his father's bluff boorish exterior. Canin keeps readers so thoroughly engaged that the anticipation of resolution is almost like dread, as in the beautiful and wrenching ``Batorsag and Szerelem,'' in which the narrator recalls the gradual revelation of his family's painful secrets and a quiet secret of his own, the most painful and insidious of all. BOMC and QPB selection; author tour. (Feb.)

Library Journal