Who Will Hear Your Secrets?
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A federal agent quits his job after his warning about a terrorist attack goes unheeded. A woman fleeing her abusive lover realizes her safety will forever be cruelly out of reach. An American visitor to Ireland learns that he will always be too much of an outsider to understand the country's politics and cultures.
In the world of Who Will Hear Your Secrets? fragile human relationships are marked by lies, betrayals, suppressed memories, and rare moments of joy. Whether examining broken communications between lovers or the misunderstandings that destroy old friendships, these stories concern the issues that divide us, in a world where the present is haunted and sometimes overpowered by the past, and the future holds only the possibility—never the assurance—of forgiveness.
This is Robley Wilson's sixth story collection. Speaking of his first collection, Kurt Vonnegut said, "His writing is an admirable demonstration of the continuing vitality of the short story form, and handsome proof that we are not mistaken when we continue, with Mr. Wilson, to love it so."
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Wilson's sixth story collection (after The World Still Melting) explores the ways in which men and women understand themselves in terms of the opposite sex and the fraught relationships they form with one another. The protagonist of "Petra," a woman who has raised her kids and sent them off into the world, exclaims to her clueless husband, "It kills me, what you expect from us." "Who's us'?," he asks. "Women. Wives. Me.," she responds. This kind of emotional acuity flows throughout this collection, which raises many more questions about gender relations than it purports to resolve. In "Crooked," a Sarah Elliot's life is told through a lifetime of men and their crimes and betrayals. She describes herself as "untethered," as is the reader's understanding of her without the men of her past to provide context. These women seem never to recover from their shared time with their respective men, though the latter are also subject to the tension of their own ties to the opposite sex. In "Charm," a "lapsed Catholic" gives up God for the fairer sex: "That center that still point around which, like a feral animal just beyond the firelight, Peter's concerns make a restless circling is Woman." Though always stopping short of a verdict, Wilson's stories are pitch-perfect.
