Telling the Map
Stories
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novel-la The Border State Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded story The Voluntary State. Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the border … into Tennessee.
Praise for Christopher Rowe:
“Rowe’s stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter’s night when the fire starts burning low. Terrific.”
—Justina Robson (Glorious Angels)
“As good as he is now, he’ll keep getting better. Read these excellent stories, and see what I mean.”—Jack Womack (Going, Going, Gone)
“Rowe’s work might remind you of that of Andy Duncan. Both exemplify an archetypically Southern viewpoint on life’s mysteries, a worldview that admits marvels in the most common of circumstances and narrates those unreal intrusions in a kind of downhome manner that belies real sophistication.”— Asimov’s
“As smooth and heady as good Kentucky bourbon.”— Locus
Christopher Rowe’s stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon awards, frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages, praised by the New York Times Book Review, and long listed in the Best American Short Stories. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writer’s Studio. Rowe and his wife Gwenda Bond co-write the Supernormal Sleuthing Series for children, and reside in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his inventive debut collection, Rowe bends the world we know, remaking regions of the southern United States. Appalachian settings, recurring characters, and dystopian themes of societal degradation link the stories. In "The Voluntary State," a band of marauders from Kentucky attack a painter named Soma's car and kidnap him. Japheth Sapp, the leader of the captors, recruits Soma in a plan to sneak into Nashville and kill Athena Parthenus, the governor of Tennessee. Meanwhile, Jenny, a mechanic, reunites Soma with his repaired (and sentient) vehicle. All paths converge in an explosive conclusion. In "The Border State," twin cyclists Maggie and Michael Hammersmith set off on a bike race across Kentucky. Their ride takes them along a river and the Girding Wall, which isolates Athena's Tennessee. The race evolves into a search for their missing father, and a hunt for answers to mysterious messages from their mother, who drowned in a flash flood 20 years earlier. Rowe skillfully reinvents familiar narratives and widens common story lines into a world where anything seems possible. Wild creativity, haunting imagery, and lyricism as displayed in "Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms" urge readers forward even as the pacing slows to provide needed exposition. While at times the poetic syntax of the sentences hampers comprehension, the book offers an immersive and original reading experience.
