Hyperion Books

Readers' Guide

Last Year's Jesus:
A Novella and Nine Stories
by Ellen Slezak

About this Guide
The following author biography, critical praise and list of questions about this book are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach this book.

About this Book

A first collection of interconnected stories by an award-winning writer with a distinctive voice and an unerring sense of place.

The stories in this affecting debut collection are populated by the sober, self effacing members of Detroit's Polish-Catholic working class. Linked by place and characters, the stories create a world that feels both familiar and strange, where religion is a way of life, and traditions are carried down through the generations. But even this isolated community cannot remain immutable. In these wonderfully poignant and witty stories based on people and places she knows well, Ellen Slezak documents the colorful clash of young and old, of religious and secular, of traditional values and the temptations of the flesh. Like Winesburg, Ohio, Last Year's Jesus creates a fully realized world teetering on the brink of change. Writing with tremendous empathy, warmth, and humor, Slezak brings to life the sights and sounds of a place she calls home -- a place readers won't soon forget.

About the Author

Ellen Slezak's short fiction has been published in more than a dozen literary journals, including American Literary Review, ZYZZYVA, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. She was a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Awards, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has twice been awarded Illinois Arts Council grants for fiction writing. Born and raised in Detroit, she now lives in Los Angeles.

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss the ways that place informs the characters in this book. Are people typically products of their environment? Talk about the characters in these stories who rise above their circumstances, and also about those who don't.

2. These stories are told from different points of view -- some in first person, others in close third, still others in third person omniscient. In what way do these different points of view add to your understanding of character? Discuss why the writer may have made the choice she did in any given story.

3. Talk about youth and age, and the relationship between the two, as a theme in these stories.

4. A few of the stories are told through a child's point of view. Talk about the opportunities and limitations that child narrators present in fiction in general and in these stories in particular.

5. Many of the mothers in these stories have abandoned their children either figuratively or literally. Discuss the role of the missing mother in this book. In which stories do you have hope that the mother will return? In which stories are you less certain she will?

6. Talk about children's understanding of how and why their parents fail them. Do the children in these stories forgive their mothers and fathers? Is the future of the adult written clearly in the life of the child?

7. Would the people in these stories be different if they lived in a place that was known for making movies, harvesting wheat, or creating computer software, instead of producing cars?

8. A few of these stories are told from the point of view of a man or a boy. Discuss these particular stories and the general idea of writers writing outside their own experience, be it gender, race, religion, or culture.

9. Grief can serve as a motivating force or as a tranquilizing drag. It may drive people to do things they might not otherwise do or it may stop them cold, rendering them unable to do almost anything. In what ways does grief motivate or stop the characters in these stories?

10. Discuss the role of humor in these stories.

11. The writer chooses to use the framework of a baseball season to set the pace of the novella. Talk about how the imposition of such a frame can structure and strengthen a work of fiction.

Reviews

"An interesting and itinerant feeling" --New York Times Book Review

"Impressive." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"True to its midwestern roots without being constricted by them" --Kirkus

paperback: April 2003; $13.95US/$19.95CAN; 0786886382
Available at your favorite bookseller.

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