Retraction

An unnamed narrator travels to a seaside town at the invitation of a man he barely knows. Introduced to a group of artists who have gathered there to attend a performance, he listens to their stories-accounts of lives given over, sometimes at great cost, to the demands of art. As the day progresses, the town itself becomes a place of quiet reckoning, where memory and silence take hold. Contemplative, spare, and charged with a restrained intensity, Retraction is a powerful meditation on the extremes artists submit to in the name of their work, the past's resistance to revision, and the fragility of the fictions that bind the living to the dead.