![Heart Attack Watch](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Heart Attack Watch](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
Heart Attack Watch
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- R$ 89,90
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- R$ 89,90
Descrição da editora
Heart Attack Watch is built around disasters large and small--those we know enough to fear but for which we can never prepare. The blackout. The car crash. The diagnosis. In these moments of reckoning, Alyson Foster's characters grow achingly alive. There is Julia, the dreamy school-bus driver of "The Theory of Clouds" whose cohabitation with her partner, Danae, long unremarked-on in their factory town, becomes an issue when a group of environmental scientists arrive, galvanizing the community's hatred and suspicion. There is Nina, the scrappy, home-schooled girl in "The Place of the Holy," who helps her mother care for the battered women who arrive at their door--and for whom the arrival of a new male helper is the greatest threat. Jane, the recent college dropout in the titular story, ponders the reaches of outer space and the limits of her own brain from atop a lifeguard chair during the eerie, early-morning hours at the swimming pool, trying to ward off the moment she might need to act.
Alyson Foster is a writer of fierce lucidity, and Heart Attack Watch shows her at the peak of her craft.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first collection of stories, Foster (God Is an Astronaut) explores moments of catastrophe and the brief stillness created when people are forced into a pressing, decisive responses. In "Sand Castles" a writer, her poet husband, and their twin daughters enter a sand-castle competition at their vacation home in Michigan. The idyllic setting breaks into chaos when the narrator loses grasp of her toddler in the evening tide: "Jeff might know a word for this, a precise and spare phrase to describe the point where everything hangs precariously in the balance." In "Blackout," Denise is worrying about her hardworking but reticent teenage daughter when she witnesses a power outage from the roof of the hospital where she works, an event that portends the stunning sight of her troubled daughter poised on their home's roof, "bare toes lined up along the overburdened gutter, leaning forward." In "The Place of the Holy," the standout of the collection, teenage Nina's world is imperiled when a minister makes a house call and doesn't leave. Nina, who believes that "knowledge begins with a person's comprehension of their own unglamorous essence," beautifully notes how "trouble and sin are infinite and inextricable" at the moment when her mother's treacherous affections for the minister become apparent. Sharp, unsentimental descriptions of these difficult situations will keep readers on their toes throughout Foster's astute collection.