What Isn't Remembered
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn’t Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves—a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner.
A young man longs for his mother’s love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother’s affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family’s genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later.
Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn’t Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Russian Armenian Gorcheva-Newberry's vibrant collection, a series of immigrants embrace their adopted culture while remaining rootless and shackled to the past. "All of Me" depicts a brooding Russian writer living in Roanoke, Va., and her best friend Norma, an OB-GYN nurse with a strong libido. Both women are in their mid-40s and have each been married for nearly 20 years, yet the narrator feels disconnected from her husband and later receives a surprising confession from Norma. In "The Heart of Things," 35-year-old Carmen has a job at a dinner theater in the U.S. while her older sister Leezy remains in their native Moscow. Carmen receives a message from Leezy informing her of their mother's death, plunging her into a reverie over their differences; she then flies to Moscow for the funeral and brings her seatmate Josh, with whom she'd connected on the flight, and who ends up serving as pallbearer. The lyrical and haunting "Pictures of the Snow" follows a 60-something Russian woman's disappearance. Her ex-husband, Richard, describes her as "fog falling over the mountains in great waves," and returns to the family home searching for clues, wondering if she'd been an apparition all along. Throughout, the situations are arresting and the images indelible. Gorcheva-Newberry's luminous prose will remain vivid in the reader's mind.
