Distance No Object: Stories

In Distance No Object, Gloria Frym turns her ironic, passionate gaze to post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco. Private lives are still swept along by the currents of history, as in the sixties. But the names of the wars have changed…the bombs fall on Iraq, and "the war on poverty" becomes a war against the poor. The stories of Distance No Object evoke the deep frustrations between generations, friends, neighbors, and races. Yet civility, quotidian justice, a common language, and new love are imagined…and Kafka finds his true bride.

"Frym turns an unflinching eye on human interaction, capturing casual and intimate exchanges between strangers on trains, estranged husbands and wives, and errant children and their parents in this sensitive and assured collection…Frym focuses on sensitive social issues…her politically charged narratives are among her best."—Publishers Weekly

"…a collection that is possibly ahead of its time while it masquerades as an elegy for an end to an era."—Austin Chronicle

"Quiet and moving in their intensity of feeling."—Kirkus Reviews

"Put Gloria Frym's splendidly knowing vision of the urban with Grace Paley's and Stephen Dixon's. Her voice is tender, searching, and ever so slightly insolent—you greet these stories like friends stopping by unannounced, friends so beguiling that you wish they'd stay longer than they do."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun, with Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon

"Gloria Frym's stories strike me as going directly to the heart in a rational way. They hurt by being clear and reasonable—like William Carlos Williams' poetry, say. But hurt doesn't mean hurt, exactly; it means affected in a necessary way."—Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses

Gloria Frym is no stranger to the literary scene, having been a writer and teacher for over two decades. She attended the University of New Mexico under the tutelage of poet Robert Creeley. "Creeley had quite a bit of national acclaim by that time," says Frym, "but I didn't know it. I just knew he was important to me and his presence brought a lot of important writers—Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and others—to what was essentially an outpost on Route 66." Gloria Frym is the author of a previous collection of short stories, How I Learned, as well as several volumes of poetry, including By Ear, Back to Forth, Impossible Affection, and the forthcoming Homeless at Home. She is also the author of a book of interviews, Second Stories: Conversations with Women Artists. Since 1987, she has been a member of the core faculty of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco.