Bliss and Other Short Stories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this daring collection of nine stories introduces readers to an edgy vision and a world in which certainties are tested and found wanting. A Cambodian refugee negotiates the icy waters of American social and sexual life. A young couple seeks “peak experiences” to escape grief, only to discover that they’ve brought it along with them. A teenage girl, unable to face the imminent end of her grandfather’s life, risks her own life in an impulsive act. A man’s fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his finding, albeit through a terrifying labyrinth, his heart’s desire. The characters in Bliss and Other Short Stories must find their way to a truth that, though less than perfect, is one they can live with. Finding bliss, it seems, is as much about pain as about pleasure, and in Ted Gilley’s writing the discovery is always exquisite.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gilley's debut collection offers admirably constructed narratives from which his troubled protagonists emerge bearing small, resonant victories. The narrator of "Vanishing World" is the youngest son of a suburban Connecticut family that blows apart in the 1960s: mom, unsure this is the life she had envisioned, has an affair; dad struggles to maintain a clientele for artwork falling out of style; one of his twin sisters is murdered; and the narrator experiences his first homosexual love affair while in the navy. In the beautifully depicted "White," a married couple recognizes in the space of a quick, explosive argument the fatal flaws in their relationship. The "lost" young woman narrator of "House of Prayer" becomes vulnerable to the proselytizing of her born-again Christian roommate at the same time she's shaken by her boyfriend's infidelity and her bipolar sister's psychotic episodes. Another lovable misfit redeems himself from misunderstanding in the title story by declaring: "All my life, I seem to have been mistaken for someone else." Telling, make-or-break moments are the crux of Gilley's stories, allowing his sharply etched characters to find unexpected purpose under fire.
