Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: and Other Stories - Softcover

Fearnside, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1622881036 ISBN 13: 9781622881031

Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016

Synopsis

"Jeff Fearnside's is a welcome new voice. His short fiction is sharply drawn, often poignant, and always surprising."--Mary Clearman Blew, author of This Is Not the Ivy League
 
The 13 short stories in Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air are linked thematically by the recurring idea of flight, in its various definitions and senses. The characters are sometimes in flight from their situations, sometimes from other people, sometimes from themselves.

Stories range from contemporary to historical, from realistic to magical realist. The known and the unknown often blur as the characters struggle to understand the unseen forces that move them. Ultimately, the crises that all the characters encounter are psychological or spiritual in some way, however each may define that; as the title of the collection suggests, the characters find themselves levitating somewhere between their deepest desires and an exquisite and terrifying nothingness.

No one in these stories "wins" in the traditional sense; there are no tidy answers. But the stories are subtly life affirming in how each character deals with the difficulties of life. Each learns something about himself or herself, however fleeting that knowledge may be, however small a step forward it inspires. Life isn't static, and neither are these people.

"Fearnside's prose is succulent with sensory detail. Through the lens of his characters' lives, he offers a keen awareness of history and human experience in all its spiritual, emotional, and physical complexity."--Lisa Norris, author of Women Who Sleep with Animals
 
"Fearnside's characters exhibit a quiet dignity rarely encountered in life or on the page. As a reader, I appreciate the breathing room."--Ayun Halliday, author of No Touch Monkey!
 
"Each and every story in Jeff Fearnside's debut collection is a new exploration into human need, depravity, tenderness, and ineptitude, a combination that Fearnside employs with the skill of a master.... It feels more like a tenth book than a first, this wise writer so in tune with humanness, it's clear he's been doing it, living it, his entire life."--Mike Czyzniejewski, author of I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories

If you enjoyed For a Little While by Rick Bass, The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr, and Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch, then you'll want to check out the stories in Jeff Fearnside's Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air.

About this title

About the Author

JEFF FEARNSIDE's writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, The Pinch, and Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet (Press 53). Awards for his writing include a Grand Prize in the Santa Fe Writers Project's Literary Awards Program, the Mary Mackey Short Story Prize, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. His work has been nominated for Best New American Voices, The Best Small Fictions, and three times for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he is at work on various writing projects.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Making Love

"Jeff Fearnside's is a welcome new voice. His short fiction is sharply drawn, often poignant, and always surprising."--Mary Clearman Blew, author of This Is Not the Ivy League

"Jeff Fearnside's stories of flight are also a collection of firsts--an evangelical boy's first kiss, another's first time wearing shorts. While his characters negotiate their first times being left or leaving, being buried in snow or throwing a fastball,the people of this world are tempted by the forbidden and the thrill of risk.Despite their mistakes, there is magic there too, and told in Fearnside's decisive prose, the mess of human lives is made as clear as anything."--Wendy J. Fox, author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories

"Fearnside's characters exhibit a quiet dignity rarely encountered in life or on the page. As a reader, I appreciate the breathing room."--Ayun Halliday, author of No Touch Monkey!

"Though the title of this debut collection of stories suggests the significance of being in flight and the benefits of a kind of waywardness, more often than not the places these engaging whims of narrative occur are as embodied as the quirky characters, and with every bit as much at stake. These stories explore the genius of place as they discover the foolhardiness and the joys and sorrows of the characters who strive for something at least approaching meaning within that genius. Jeff Fearnside's stories are refreshingly full-bodied and fully aware."--George Looney, author of A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness and Meditations Before the Windows Fail

"Jeff Fearnside's stories remind me of the work of Rick Bass: they're both lyrical and hard-hitting; they display a vast range; they illuminate the human condition; and, perhaps most importantly, they celebrate place and the natural world. This is a deeply satisfying collection."--Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know

From the Inside Flap

More Praise for Making Love

"From a Japanese internment camp to the rural Midwest, Fearnside moves his diverse characters with effortless prose through issues of racism, abuse, religion, and loneliness. These are characters desperate to fight against the earth's final pull, refusing to be buried, cut down, or to suffer temptations that will keep them from their final reward. Fearnside's compassion and unique vision shines over and within these questioning souls."--Tara L. Masih, Series Editor, The Best Small Fictions

"Jeff Fearnside is a master of moments that lift his characters beyond the humdrum into haunting realms of fear and ecstasy. His titular story is a moving exploration of sexual intimacy, its terrors and joys. In another, a farmer's desire to feel the 'renegade bluestem and slough-grass brushing his fingertips' tempts him to flee a cultivated landscape. The innovative 'Going for Broke' interweaves a young man's history in World War Two Japanese-American internment camps with moments after the war when he's pitching a no-hitter, the game of his life. In Fearnside's brilliant 'Maps and Compasses,' a young man sharing his survival with a buck sees in the wild animal's eyes 'a greater life' than he has ever seen. Read these stories! Flight by flight, they break above clouds of the everyday into moments of jaw-dropping wonder and clarity."--Wendell Mayo, author of The Cucumber King of Kėdainia: Fictions

"Fearnside's prose is succulent with sensory detail. Through the lens of his characters' lives, he offers a keen awareness of history and human experience in all its spiritual, emotional, and physical complexity. Whether a character is scooping his hands into the sandy loam of earth on a farm or playing baseball inside a Japanese internment camp, we feel the depth and complexity of people whose lives might otherwise go unnoticed. Fearnside's imaginative accounts render the world both real and beautiful in a way that celebrates ordinary humans whose acquaintance you'll be glad to make."--Lisa Norris, author of Women Who Sleep with Animals

"Like an airplane lifting off the tarmac at dawn, these stories amaze with their power and their seeming simplicity. At turns humorous and profoundly compassionate,they illuminate the lives of ordinary people--a baggage handler, a housewife-turned-editor, a farm boy--showing them to be both exceptional and universal. Here is a collection that challenges us to see in others what we may only dimly sense in ourselves, the humble beauty of the human struggle, its immediacy and its complexity. And while Fearnside brings forth a masterpiece of insight, he does so with such a light touch, the reader might easily be lured into thinking they were overhearing a conversation spoken by a campfire or in the halls of a country church, not realizing that Fearnside has translated into words the dialogue of the heart."--Karelia Stetz-Waters, author of Forgive Me If I've Told You This Before and Something True

"In his debut collection, Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, Jeff Fearnside has written authentic and moving stories that explore love and complex relationships. Indeed, Fearnside's narrators take the air by storm and generously swoop through thematic layers in their investigation of fathers and sons, lovers, friends, hunters, surreal cat-like aliens, even Japanese internment camp residents. In these remarkable tales, the reader finds sure footing in the humanness of such disparate individuals, but by the end of the book, we, too, have taken wing in a beautiful flight of fancy,understanding life's little defeats and victories. This book will inspire!"--Cate McGowan, author of True Places Never Are

"Each and every story in Jeff Fearnside's debut collection is a new exploration into human need, depravity, tenderness, and ineptitude, a combination that Fearnside employs with the skill of a master. It's a book that's teeming with sex and nostalgia, anxiety and elation, highlighting what we're all capable of, to what lengths we'll extend ourselves to make things just a little better. It feels more like a tenth book than a first, this wise writer so in tune with humanness, it's clear he's been doing it, living it, his entire life."--Mike Czyzniejewski, author of I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories

Edition details

• Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1622881036
• ISBN 13: 9781622881031
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 175