Published in 2018 (first published 2013)
224 pages
Jamie Quatro’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Quatro holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and Bennington College.
What is this book about?
“Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable” stories of the American South, “like some franker, modernized Flannery O’Connor” (The New Yorker).
Welcome to Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee. Mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, this short-story collection of infidelity, spirituality, sexuality, and family is at once “strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest . . . the closet thing I’ve seen in years to Donald Barthelme’s insouciance, sweetness and ominousness” (The New York Times Book Review).
These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations: a husband discovers the decaying corpse of his wife’s lover in their bed; an enigmatic deaf man becomes the catalyst in the destruction of his church; a child’s perspective on life is altered after the attempted murder of a loved one; an embarrassed teenager is forced to attend a pool party with her quadriplegic mother; the hole in a young boy’s heart is magically sealed when he falls in love for the first time.
