The Surprising Place: Stories
Description
A synchronized swimming coach pops pills during practice, a bagpiper cold-cocks a hawk, and an orphan puts her fist through a window, discovering in the engine noise of a jet passing overhead, the perfect witness to her inner pain. In this debut collection from prizewinning short story writer Malinda McCollum, people adrift in the American Midwest struggle to find their way in the world, with few signposts for guidance. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, over the expanse of several decades, these twelve stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories offer confrontation and consolation in equal measure.Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
[T]his is not the Des Moines of civic boosters, spacious parks, public art, clean air and other wholesome attractions... McCollum's writing is edgy, energetic, often funny.
--New York TimesThe 12 loosely linked tales in McCollum's prize-winning, virtuosic debut are as funny and vivid as the characters are lonely and desperate... Darkly comic and brimming with conviction, McCollum's taut collection is an inverted portrait of the American dream.
--Booklist[W]hat is 'surprising' in Malinda McCollum's excellent new book and winner of the Juniper Prize for fiction is not a matter of geography, in the prosaic sense. Rather, it concerns a different kind of space, a province of heart and mind.... McCollum offers intensely observed portraits of her characters' internal struggles which are often unsettling and full of contradiction.
--Dactyl Review
