Glimmer Train Stories, #46 - Softcover

Melodie S. Edwards; Brian Ames; Steven Polansky; Callie Wright; Doug Crandell; Dianne King Akers; Eric Puchner; Robin Bradford; Interview With Allen Morris Jones

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188096645X ISBN 13: 9781880966457

Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc., 2003

Synopsis

Great new literary short fiction. Eight stories by emerging and well established writers. One interview with Allen Morris Jones, acclaimed author of Last Year's River.

About this title

About the Author:

MELODIE S. EDWARDS was born in Washington state in 1971 and raised in a rural mountain town in Colorado. Most recently, she has published a trail guide to northern Colorado and newspaper articles on the subject. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner and other magazines, and her drama has been performed on stage in Durango, Colorado. She has a completed novel and is currently attending the University of Michigan MFA program in creative writing, where "Si-Si-Gwa-D" received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Award for Short Fiction.

BRIAN AMES writes from St. Charles County, Missouri. His work appears in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train Stories, the Massachusetts Review, Weber Studies, South Dakota Review, Sweet Fancy Moses, and Wisconsin Review. Pocol Press of Virginia published his story collection, Smoke Follows Beauty, in February 2002. He is a former editor of Wind Row, Washington State University'’s literary journal.

STEVEN POLANSKY'’s short fiction has appeared, among other places, in the New Yorker, HarperĀ’s, New England Review, Best American Short Stories, and Glimmer Train. His book of stories, Dating Miss Universe (Ohio State University Press), won the Sandstone Prize for Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award. "A Courtship Story" is taken from Zatulofsky, a novel as yet unpublished. He lives in Minnesota.

CALLIE WRIGHT grew up in upstate New York and studied at Yale University. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a novel. This is her second appearance in Glimmer Train.

DOUG CRANDALL is the recipient of the 2001 Sherwood Anderson Writer'’s Grant as well as the 2001 River City Award in Fiction, sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation. His work has appeared, or will appear, in the Nebraska Review, Indiana Review, Evansville Literary Review, Hawaii Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, the Oklahoma Review, and River City.

DIANNE KING AKERS lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and son. Her fiction has been published in American Short Fiction and American Way. One of her pieces was recognized among "One Hundred Other Distinguished Stories of 1994" in The Best American Short Stories, 1995. She has been a newspaper feature writer, editor, bookkeeper, program director for a nonprofit disability services agency, and currently is a grant writer for a nonprofit environmental protection agency.

ERIC PUCHNER’'s work has appeared in Cimarron Review and Quarterly West, and has been cited for Special Mention in Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses. Puchner lives in San Francisco and is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

ALLEN MORRIS JONES'’s debut novel, Last Year'’s River (Houghton Mifflin), was published to critical acclaim last October. Jones, the former editor of the bi-monthly Rocky Mountain literary magazine Big Sky Journal, is already hard at work on a second novel.

ROBIN BRADFORD has been writing and publishing fiction for the past fifteen years. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, Fiction, Chelsea, and other literary journals.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Robin Bradford
Bob Marley Is Dead
Just when Rebecca has forgotten all of this and is lying in her mind someplace deep among the repeating pattern of flowers on the couch, lost inside the soothing vibration of the cat’s purr, the baby wakes crying. She sits up and the cat leaps onto the floor and licks his back. Everything begins again.

Eric Puchner
Neon Tetra
The boy knew nothing about these people, only that they stole occasionally into his own neighborhood in the middle of the night, haunting homes and leaving traces of their presence: vanished speakers or mud smears on the rug or sofas glittering with glass.

Dianne King Akers
Small Speaking Parts
We wheeze and cough and snort, the three of us, and every time we slow down, my father elbows Sam or points at my dress and gets us started again. We laugh until our stomachs hurt and our noses are running and our eyes are tearing. My father and I hold our hands up to each other like crossing guards; stop, our hands say, stop, you’re killing me, but we cannot stop.

Steven Polansky
A Courtship Story
Within a twenty-block radius of Sterling Street, in what was largely an immigrant community, Louis went street by street, door to door, asking people, in whatever language they spoke, what they needed. Fabric. Foodstuffs. Furniture. Tools. Nostrums. Appliances. Stationery. Books. Clothing. Shoes. Anything they needed, anything legal, Louis found for them, and, for a fair price, delivered to their door.

Callie Wright
Wild Dunes
She had seen the whole thing, the big bang of events. The car couldn’t see the bird, the bird couldn’t see the ball, the golfer couldn’t see the flag, and the bird couldn’t see the car. But she could see it all.

Melodie S. Edwards
Si-Si-Gwa-D
He sits at the table with a beer bottle half drunk in his hand. The rest of the six pack is on a counter next to a stove top. The smell of the place is wet dog and clean man.

Brian Ames
Impala Desert
He held out each rock for me in his small hand, palm upward but cupped, pronouncing the names of the stones in succession. I noticed that his palms were the palms of a juvenile, that he had lost his toddler’s subsurface of adipose tissue, and wondered how many years it had been since I had looked at them so closely. The hands of my child.

Doug Crandell
Mother Belle
George has implicated me in the structure and details of his life to such a degree that I feel as if I have indeed known him since the dawn of time, and truth be known, it is not an entanglement I wholly dislike.

Allen Morris Jones
Interviewed by David Abrams
When you know where the story’s going, and you know what you need to accomplish, you tend to approach the structure of the novel with the sensibility of a car mechanic. You want to get into the engine and tinker.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 188096645X
• ISBN 13: 9781880966457
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208
• Editor: Susan Burmeister-Brown, Linda Swanson-Davies