Chance Does Not Exist

A journalist plunges into the underworld of Paris in 1885, searching for the elusive man who founded the International Red Cross and who has lived homeless, without a trace for twenty years.  With this story, Searching For Henri, Richard Stanford opens his new collection, Chance Does Not Exist, elaborating on the themes of missed opportunities, the inevitability of change and the powerful but fragmentary quality of memory. People are on journeys in these stories: two cousins, with temperaments so opposite they live in different worlds, drive in The Chevy Belair through a blizzard to a unique destination; in Jailbirds, a man fascinated with photography gets a job building a prison museum only to travel through time to discover the most inhumane of its acquisitions. Thieves, artists, journalists, wanderers, are the people who populate these stories, so expect the unexpected.