Pam Durban's new collection of stories explores the myriad ways
people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails
her characters - science, religion, family, self - the powerful act
of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and
fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted
collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find
themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us
all. The title story in Soon - chosen by John Updike for The Best
American Short Stories of the Century anthology - follows two
generations of a family whose lives are driven by the "patient and
brutal need that people called hope, which . . . formed from your
present life a future where you would be healed or loved." In "The
Jap Room," winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to
help her husband, a World War II veteran, finally come home.
"Rowing to Darien" introduces a famous English actress as she rows
away from her husband's rice plantation. In "Hush" a gravely ill
man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky's iconic Mammoth
Cave. An adopted child waits for his mother to come back for him in
"Birth Mother," and, in "Forward, Elsewhere, Out," a mother must
come to terms with her adolescent son's sexuality. The stories in
this collection deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and
the redemptive power of storytelling. Durban's writing has been
praised for its depth and mastery of characterization, its ability
to persuade readers that the lives of the people in her stories are
true, that their troubles and pleasures are real enough to matter.
The nuanced and artfully rendered cast in this collection wrestles
with the big questions that face us all - Why are we here? How are
we to live? What matters most? The thirteen stories in Soon have
appeared in earlier forms in Atlanta Magazine, Indiana Review,
Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, Idaho Review, Southern Review,
Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, High Five: An Anthology of
Fiction from 10 Years of Five Points, New Stories from the South:
The Year's Best, Best American Short Stories, and Best American
Short Stories of the Century. The collection includes a foreword
from novelist and short story writer Mary Hood, winner of the
Flannery O'Connor Prize, Townsend Prize, and Lillian Smith Award.
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