Glimmer Train Stories, #82 - Softcover

Lee Montgomery; Peter Ho Davies; Clayton Luz; Lauren Groff; Joan Wickersham; James Sidel; Micah Nathan; Katherine Min; Lindsay Sproul; Stafanie Freele; Christopher Bundy; Margo Williams (interviewer)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595530312 ISBN 13: 9781595530318

Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc., 2012

Synopsis

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers

Excerpts:

Lee Montgomery
Torture Techniques of North Americans
I opened the door and stepped inside. All the sounds grew into themselves as if I had just dipped my head underwater. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was where our lives left off.

Peter Ho Davies
Chance
There was a chance the baby was normal. There was a chance the baby was not.

Clayton Luz
When the Wind Blows the Water Gray
That Davis had lost one eye in an auto crash, married interracially, hugged Richard Nixon, and suffered from recurrent bouts of "lifestyle-related" liver and kidney problems endeared him to the Maurants.

Lauren Groff
A Season by the Shore
He felt between the sisters a heaviness, a syrupy depth of feeling that made him unable to wade in, and so he would pause shyly in the doorway and wait for her to raise her eyes, to notice him.

Joan Wickersham
The Tunnel, or The News from Spain
Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn't love each other couldn't fight like that--certainly not repeatedly.

James F. Sidel
Insurance
In a few years, the remaining mills would finally sputter out, though the city, unlike most of the rust belt, would survive with some measure of grace: a neutered economy of hospitals and service, free of the sweat, the carcinogenic burning and puffing required in the manufacture of solid goods.

Micah Nathan
Quarry
"Do you think he lost his shoe before he got shot, or after?" "I don't know." "If it's before he got shot, then he's just a bum," Sam said. "Walking around with one shoe. Dad won't care if we brought in a bum. Dad likes bums."

Lindsay Sproul
Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Connecticut
Miranda Tivoli found her first gray hair early one morning, while drinking a jelly glass of Earl Grey tea. She saw it in her reflection on the side of the toaster, and she knew that the smell of bergamot would remind her of aging from this point onward.

Stefanie Freele
While Surrounded by Water
Every household on the river knows how the height of the river affects them--what footage means a wet yard, a saturated garage, a soaked living room, a drenched attic. In about another foot, she'll be stuffing every crack with towels, not that it will do any good.

Christopher Bundy
Spatial Disorientation
When he chose the apartment, Mr. Lau had requested the sixth floor for good luck. Even now when he passed the fourth, he held his breath until he reached the fifth. Four shared the same sound as the word for death, and he had no intention of pausing there or breathing in its unlucky air.

Interview with Katherine Min
by Margo Williams
The events of that summer are reviewed by Alma, also, who is in a coma for most of the book, and you see the very different ways that the two characters have processed their memories, and how it has affected them, and, because it s a comedy, you see how the past is not yet done with them, and that sometimes it can be, if not redemptive, then at least not vituperative.

About this title

About the Author:

Lee Montgomery is the author of The Things Between Us: A Memoir, Whose World Is This? Stories, and Searching for Emily: Illustrated. The Things Between Us received the 2007 Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction and Whose World Is This? the 2007 John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harper's, the Atlantic, Granta, and the Paris Review, and been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories. He's a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Michigan.

Clayton Luz lives in Chicago, where he is writing his trilogy of crime novels based on real events. His novella, "One Must Think of the Future," was awarded Honorable Mention at the 2001 Santa Fe Writer Project Awards. Luz is a veteran science writer with the American Dental Association. "When the Wind Blows the Water Gray" is his first fiction publication.

Lauren Groff is the author of a novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and a story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, the title story of which first appeared in Glimmer Train and was later anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2010. Her second novel, Arcadia, was released in January 2012.

Joan Wickersham's new book of fiction, The News from Spain, is forthcoming from Knopf. She is the author of The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, and The Paper Anniversary. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Hudson Review, Story, Ploughshares, Agni, New England Review, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She also writes an op-ed column for the Boston Globe.

James Sidel grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a BA in film studies from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Jim currently lives, writes, and teaches in San Francisco.

Micah Nathan is an author, screenwriter, and essayist. His debut novel, Gods of Aberdeen, became an international bestseller, and in 2011 he published Losing Graceland. His story collection, Jack the Bastard and Other Stories, will appear in June 2012. He received his MFA from Boston University. He currently lives in the Boston area.

Katherine Min, a recipient of a 2009 North Carolina Arts Council fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and graduated from Amherst College and the Columbia School of Journalism. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Min's debut novel Secondhand World was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Bingham Award, and her story "Courting a Monk" won a Pushcart Prize. Min's stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Lindsay Sproul, originally from Massachusetts, is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, cream city review, upstreet, American Short Fiction, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

Stefanie Freele is the author of the short-story collection Feeding Strays. Her second collection, Surrounded by Water, will be released by Press 53 later this year. She is the current Healdsburg Literary Laureate and the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review. Her recent work can be found in magazines such as American Literary Review, Night Train, Prime Number Magazine, Word Riot, Whitefish Review, issue 73 of Glimmer Train, and SmokeLong Quarterly.

Christopher Bundy has published more than thirty short stories and essays in a variety of journals and magazines. He teaches English and creative writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1595530312
• ISBN 13: 9781595530318
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Susan Burmeister-Brown, Linda B. Swanson-Davies
• Illustrator: Cover By Jane Zwinger