The Sharpener and Other Stories
By Andrés Berger-KissISBN: 1891270214
Price: $15.00
Pages: 160
The Sharpener and Other Stories is an outstanding collection of twenty-four short stories. The award-winning title story, "The Sharpener," has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad. Berger-Kiss' most impressive quality is his clear and tremendously human vision of reality, as seen by scholars and critics alike, whose opinions we summarize. He is viewed as a writer with a well-carved social conscience, the key component of his writing being the multidimensional human being. He portrays the sufferer or the one holding a dream or a hope, and frequently focuses on the common worker, presenting him as the backbone of society, succeeding in writing "a psalm of poverty, a hymn of the oppressed," as one critic pointedly expresses it. The Sharpener and Other Stories is the product of a true literary master.
"Berger-Kiss's story relates how the magus-like figure
of the sharpener awakened the children to the world of the mind, to
science, mathematics, history and art, sharpening the conceptual
tools with which they would live from then on, and instilling in
them a heightened sense of social justice."
--Professor Jonathan Tittler, Cornell University
"Berger-Kiss's writings demonstrate a great observational
capacity on the part of the author, able to involve the reader and
take him to the end. With his novels and short stories he has
bestowed an inheritance to the world’s literature -
especially Colombian - that sooner or later will be recognized.
The characters in his narrative are enchanting, and he has a
special grace and profound capacity to have the reader internalize
them."
--Nelson Romero Guzman
"Andrés Berger-Kiss is one of Oregon's best poets,
novelists, and writers of short stories. He is also one of a
select breed of literary geniuses."
--Dan Hays, Literary Reviewer for the Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon