Everyone but You
Stories
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Sandra Novack has earned great acclaim with her short fiction, which has appeared in more than thirty literary venues, including The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Now, in this new collection of stories, she further demonstrates her mastery of the form while exploring a universal theme: the desire for connection.
In “Cerulean Skies,” a wife must deal with her husband’s artistic calling while reexamining the loss of her own creative passion. A young woman is forced to confront the truth of her past, and its affect on her present love life, when she inherits her late dad’s possessions in “My Father’s Mahogany Leg.” In “Memphis” a man walks a delicate line between caring for his schizophrenic brother and keeping his new marriage afloat. “The Thin Border Between Here and Disaster” finds two married college professors faced with the fallout from their divorce, and a boy wrestles with his faith after the death of his mother in “Morty, El Morto.”
Fierce, sexual, and contentious, these moving tales place Sandra Novack’s prodigious talent on full display. Everyone but You illuminates the common truths behind some of the most profound moments in our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most characters in this collection, already down on their luck, soon discover even more misery just around the next bend. Though small moments of grace are possible, they're invariably accompanied by failure and disillusionment. Novack (Precious) is fascinated by those on the edge: of insanity, of break-ups, of self-discovery fraught with acute pain. Moira, the narrator of "Conversions on the Road to Damascus," shares an apartment and, secretly, a boyfriend with Cass, a young histrionic actress. Moira is either paranoid and consumed with guilt or Cass is plotting revenge. The truth and the problem is that by the time the triangle unravels, everyone seems ridiculously misguided. Moira's proclamations, such as "I have always imagined that I would end up in bed with a man who looked like Nietzsche," could be excused as character quirks were they not the provenance of so many characters in so many stories. While premises are intriguing, too many unwieldy or unlikely turns and inconsistent character traits make it hard to invest. Forces in these 18 tales are driven by exigency rather than internal logic, and many follow the tried-and-true form of concluding with insights that shimmer with the promise of epiphanies. Something more fulfilling is just beyond the ken.
