Mendocino Fire
Stories
-
-
5.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
In this collection of richly imagined stories, Elizabeth Tallent, the master of short fiction, delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge.
Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise.
Now Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explore moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In these pages, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone.
With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fourth collection, Tallent (In Constant Flight) explores the spaces between people through 10 expertly crafted stories. Mostly set in California with forays into Iowa, the book features characters with strong ties to place, whether they're navigating the wilds of academia or of nature. This is perhaps most evident in the title story, whose protagonist seeks to protect California's wildlife by living in a 500-year-old tree. In "Tabriz," a man wonders if a rug he dug out of the trash catalyzed the unraveling of his marriage. "Eros 101," a sharp, affecting look at longing, academia, and office politics, reveals a woman struggling to reconcile intellect and emotion. And "Nobody You Know" subverts expectations of a narrative that seems at first to be about a lover's revenge. Taken as a whole, these stories examine love in its many forms, with the most successful probing the realm of romantic love, where Tallent addresses emotional conflicts with a refreshingly light touch. Tallent's collection offers a smart, thought-provoking study of desire and disappointment.
