Details

Library of Congress genre(s)

• Short stories

FaST Subject(s)

• Short stories

Series

Iowa short fiction award [More in this series]

Summary note

"The characters in these stories have been forced into conditions of life which they find unbearable, and the stories chart their (often tragically misguided) attempts to relieve their suffering through attempts to connect with other people or through the pursuit of addictive attachments (to opiates in one story, to sleep in another). The collection encompasses diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism ("Keeping," "Fault Trace") to a Kafka-esque fairy tale ("The Master of Sleep"), from fabulist "weird fiction" ("A Hungry Ghost") to a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals in the form of a re-envisioning of an episode from The Odyssey-this time from a decidedly unheroic perspective ("The Death of Elpenor"). The collection also shows stylistic range, offering a frenetic and voluble 2nd person narrator in "All at Sea" and a stripped-down minimalist aesthetic in "The Watchman." These stories invite the reader to suspend ideological and moral prejudices and to undertake a fresh consideration of such issues through an empathic engagement with the lives of the protagonists, the ethically ambiguous positions from which, for example, a petroleum engineer responds to data suggesting that a well he oversees may be causing earthquakes, or the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

• Keeping
• Two valleys
• All at sea
• Fault trace
• Mythology
• The death of Elpenor
• The master of sleep
• A hungry ghost
• Ghost bike
• Creek people
• Watchman.

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ISBN

• 9781609389178 (paperback)
• 1609389174 (paperback)

LCCN

2023001499

OCLC

1369573457

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