Items related to So There!
Synopsis
With the graceful lyricism of a musician’s ear, the stories of So There! inhabit the quiet spaces of heartache and the loud spaces of rage. Their landscapes harken back to the South of Reid’s first novel, In the Breeze of Passing Things, and form their own kind of topography, the human heart and its many urges. Within the world of this collection, girls and women sidle the precipice of new lives and new selves.
In “If You Must Know,” a young woman serves as host to a cicada and tries to recreate the bliss of her first sexual experience, the very moment when the insect chose to burrow into her. “Pearl in a Pocket” is the story of young teen Vyla—one of thirteen sisters, some living, more miscarried—who discovers how powerless love can be. “So There,” a 15-year old girl recalls the rhythm of nights her father swung her around the Black Diamond Lounge while her mother stole dances with anyone and everyone else.
The girls and women of these stories stand at the edge of rebirth undeniably aware that who they are—their shape, their class, their family, their brand of love or crazy—makes them far more complicated than the world will allow. They are brave and terrified, isolated and enveloped; they are dead and bleed to live. And all seem to stand with hands on hips, defiant in that knowledge, even perhaps eating it up.
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About the Author
NICOLE LOUISE REID is the author of the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Other Voices, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, and Meridian. A recipient of the Willamette Award in Fiction, she teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana. She lives in Newburgh, Indiana.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From So There! From “The Pearl in a Pocket”
What Vyla knew by heart was the water stretching on and on, the way it felt to sit hours on the pebble shore waiting. The Pearl was long and thin here, turning like an elbow, for years pushing through with just enough speed to lose your flat sheet to the current before you’d finished wringing the fitted; but these days it hardly moved at all. Stinking of the paper mills and streaky fish heads Poppa used for bait. So cloudy in its stillness that she quit sticking her toes in while she sat thinking about the boy. Or about the girls; there were babies in this river. Her sisterbabies born broken or cold. All of them sisterbabies, and so many gone in that way. So she knew where to go to talk to them, and she knew which nights to sleep heavy.
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- PublisherStephen F. Austin University Press
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1936205459
- ISBN 13 9781936205455
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages176
- Rating
