Foreign Climes

How far do we have to travel to come face to face with ourselves?

Foreign Climes is a collection of short stories linked by place, or more exactly by the strangeness of new places, new territories both geographical and psychological. It proceeds from a young person's sense of boundaries to an older person's breaking through boundaries-and then beyond, to a voice that constructs the world by way of possibilities both found and left unexplored.

Some of the stories take their protagonists literally to strange, unsteady ground. A teenaged narrator travels from leafy North Carolina to the desert to engage in battle against a boy he calls "Minnesota," a stand-in for a greater battle against his parents' dissolving marriage. A young Pashtun woman from northern Pakistan finds herself in cold New England amid the overwhelming landscape of her own desire. An American working abroad struggles to find her place in a relationship that seems unbound by language.

Other stories encounter alienation closer to home. A swaggering poker shark confronts a brutality unleashed by the exploitive nature of his world. A woman leaving her marriage finds an entire life in the lineaments of a house she'll never inhabit. A mother crosses a chasm to reach a son steeped in mania.

"People don't change," the poet Charles Olsen wrote. "They only stand more revealed." These stories reveal the heart and the potential of the people within them by thrusting them into those places of discomfort and exhilaration that leave us all naked before the world.