Heavier Than Air: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) - Softcover

Caspers, Nona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558496440 ISBN 13: 9781558496446

Publisher: Unknown Sponsor, 2008

Synopsis

Throughout this collection, which was plucked from a pile of 300 manuscripts and awarded the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction, Caspers details the many ways reality can interfere with our dreams. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction becomes a dominant theme. . . . Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people―it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters―question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen up close.New York Times Book Review

About this title

From the Back Cover

"In the story 'Vegetative States' one of the characters says, 'I stand at my Auntie Jenny's hospital bed and watch her breathe. That's all she has to do-makes living look easy.' The quiet, honest stories in Heavier Than Air make writing look easy. Like the ideal Midwesterners of the imagination, the stories are powerful and true without ever drawing undo attention to themselves. To read them is to be lulled into deceptively simple narratives only to have your heart broken in the end. The collection is full of characters poised between themselves and the other, caught in moments that reveal the bare essence of what they-and we-have been looking for all along. Simply beautiful."--Anna Menendez, author of "When I Was in Cuba I Was a German Shepherd and Loving Che"

"Nona Caspers' Heavier Than Air is that rare book of short stories that seems larger and more expansive than the form. In it she captures whole worlds at the moment of rupture: farm girls and fathers in love with the wrong people; lives lost to AIDS; men driven to insanity by the pressures of the economy; women straying from religion into madness-people on farms and in big cities alike finding their lives entirely changed. And in that turmoil is Nona Caspers' steady, unfailing eye and ear, capturing what we need to hold to."--Maxine Chernoff, author of "Some of Her Friends That Year and Signs of Devotion" "These stories are beautiful and devastating and relentless. The quality and originality of language and wide range of subject matter are maintained throughout. What seems at first like quiet Midwestern 'domestic fiction' gradually and inevitably moves into extreme emotional and mental territory as a result of love and desire."--Wendy Brenner, author of "Large Animals in Everyday Life and Phone Calls from the Dead"

"Few writers stare down the perils of love, in all its myriad forms, as honestly and with as much intensity as Nona Caspers. The stories in Heavier Than Air are classic, beautiful, and so achingly felt that you will feel as though you've lived them yourself."--Peter Orner, author of "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo"

About the Author

Nona Caspers' new book The Fifth Woman, a Novel in Stories (Sarabande Books, 2018), was selected by Stacy D'erasmo for the Mary McCarthy award. The story, "Frontiers" was originally published in Cimarron Review and was selected by Best American Short Stories as a "Distinguished Story of 2016." Caspers' other books of fiction include Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Little Book of Days (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009). In 2013 she co-edited with Joell Hallowell a book of oral histories, Lawfully Wedded Wives: Rethinking Marriage in the 21st Century.

Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, a LAMBDA Literary Award nomination, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews, including Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cimmaron Review, Black Warrior, Ontario Review, and The Sun. She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Unknown Sponsor
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1558496440
• ISBN 13: 9781558496446
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208