Here Until August
Stories
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- 11٫99 US$
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"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." —Michelle de Kretser
The stories in Here Until August follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are traveling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. These are people who move with the seasons. We meet them negotiating reluctant or cowardly departures, navigating uncertain returns, or biding the disquieting calm that so often precedes moments of decisive action.
In one story, an agoraphobic French émigré compulsively watches disturbing footage from the other side of the world as she attempts to keep a dog named Chavez out of trouble. In another, a young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings–on of their neighbors than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. Other stories play out against the fictional counterparts of iconic Australian and American locales, places that are recognizable but set just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant islands, sunlit woodlands or paths made bright by ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.
From the Catskills to New South Wales, from the remote and abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of a North American metropolis, these transformative stories show how the places where we choose to live our lives can just as easily turn us inward as outward.
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The 10 sharp, vivid stories in Rowe's first collection (after the novel A Loving, Faithful Animal) showcase characters overwhelmed by the harsh and often beautiful places in which they feel not at all at home. In "Sinkers," Cristian takes his mother's ashes to the lake that now, courtesy of the hydroelectric company, covers the town where she grew up, and tries vainly to locate her sunken, ravaged home under a lake that "tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky." Severine, the narrator of "Chavez," consumed by a grief only gradually revealed, runs from France to a grim neighborhood in a North American city, where she is saddled with a mysterious, "wolflike" dog whose owner has left ostensibly for a couple of weeks, but never returns. "What Passes for Fun," the collection's shortest story, more prose poem than fully developed narrative, centers on an image of the physical world that serves as metaphor for the whole volume, a sheet of dazzling ice suspended over a pond that has dropped away, apparently solid but actually dangerously fragile. While the characters' predicaments are often familiar, Rowe's fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader's attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters' sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers.
