Background
Malone, Paul Scott was born on June 15, 1952 in Houston, Texas, United States. Son of Robert Walter and Lillian Ann (Hagewood) Malone.
( Paul Scott Malone’s first volume of stories, In an Arid...)
Paul Scott Malone’s first volume of stories, In an Arid Land, won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the best book of fiction for 1995. His second book of stories raises his award-winning standard. Memorial Day and Other Stories has a cast of characters not easily forgotten; they are damaged young men struggling with a hostile worldor at least a world they don’t always understand. Malone’s major theme is the angst of modern man. Even the women charactersand they are never the protagonistssuffer from one sort of anxiety or another. In the title story, William, the narrator, drifts between madness and distress and despair. In Family Photos,” Randy, the main character, is on leave from an institution for the troubled to visit his family. The more they try to draw him out, the more he retreats into his near-madness. And in the novelette that ends the volume, Dalrymple is not a disturbed person but a young man desperately seeking himself as he prepares to be drafted for service in the Vietnam War. His anxiety comes from his broken marriage, his fear of going to war, and his inability to make himself grow up. In The Solitary Heart,” one of the few stories with a major woman character, we see a pair of artistsman and wife?who carve out lives together yet really live alone. They work and eat together, but at night each goes to a solitary bed. Malone does not write happy stories, but his work probes the depths of human emotion and opens for readers windows into the minds of people in more distress than they are. Or so we hope.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875652190/?tag=2022091-20
( This House of Women opens in the small East Texas town ...)
This House of Women opens in the small East Texas town of Karankawa. The year is 1942, and the United States has just entered World War II. Pregnant and alone, nineteen-year-old Hannah Hayward arrives in Karankawa in search of a better life. As her dreams and desires change, Hannah journeys from East Texas to the Big Bend region of far West Texas with her children, transforming houses and lives through her loving labor.In a richly layered novel that is both historical and genealogical, This House of Women follows Hannah and her family across the decades: through the postwar plenty of the 1950s, the perils of Vietnam, and the Texas oil boom and crisis of the 1980s.Texas emerges as a character in its own right. The cityscapes of Houston, the process of change over decades in towns and cities, the landscape of the Chihuahuan desert—all figure into the narrative and add depth to Hannah’s experiences as the reader follows her to places rendered with painterly richness. The story partakes of the Western mythology of starting over but from a distinctly female perspective. Ultimately, Hannah emerges as a pioneer driven by the fierce longing for something different. Hannah’s flight is into connectedness, not isolation; and she takes the reader along on her often difficult but intimately told story.From the wooded roadside of Hannah’s first journey to the sharp vastness of Alpine’s desert, Malone provides a sense of space and atmosphere that engages the reader and adds contour to the events and emotions that transpire in those particular places.—Ann Brigham
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0896724581/?tag=2022091-20
( What I’m about to tell took place near the little town...)
What I’m about to tell took place near the little town of Alpine, Texas, when I was fresh out of the service and had some money in my pockets. . . . The thing that happened shouldn’t have happened and I wish it never did. But there’s no denying it and in a way I’ve been on the lam because of it ever since.” So begins the title story of In an Arid Land, a collection that depicts episodes in the lives of ordinary people facing real problems. Testament to the challenges of everyday life, the stories often revolve around tragic turning pointsthe loss of a loved one, divorce, retirement, or the pains of growing up and old. Malone’s characters are, indeed, often on the lam.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875651402/?tag=2022091-20
Malone, Paul Scott was born on June 15, 1952 in Houston, Texas, United States. Son of Robert Walter and Lillian Ann (Hagewood) Malone.
Bachelor in Journalism, University Houston, 1978. Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, University Arizona, 1986.
Teaching assistant English department University Arizona, 1983-1986. Lecturer, part-time instructor English department Wayne State University, Detroit, 1986-1987. Instructor The Authors Resource Center, Tucson, 1986.
Part-time instructor English department Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1986-1987, Austin Community College, 1988-1994. Adjunct professor Oklahoma City Community College, summer 1982.
( What I’m about to tell took place near the little town...)
( Paul Scott Malone’s first volume of stories, In an Arid...)
( This House of Women opens in the small East Texas town ...)
With United States Army, 1972-1974.
Married Cheryl Ann Knott, May 20, 1978.