Without You
Book Details
Author(s)Elizabeth Buechner Morris
ISBN / ASINB009PQ3PDO
ISBN-13978B009PQ3PD4
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
Fiction seeks the truth. What underlies conflict? What values can we relate to and what are the risks? And how, really, does the world work? Short fiction does the same, with closely-observed details, effortless dialogue, and familiarity
It’s the little things that make a short story into a big story. It’s the details and the intimacy. It’s the skillful knowing of the characters: their courage, obstinacy, fears, and resilience. In these stories we meet Josephine in Pal Jo and Linda in It’s a Long Time Pull, both holding to optimism like drowning sailors to flotsam. Amory, the man being robbed in an elevator in To Sketch a Thief is surprisingly and enchantingly thrilled by the encounter. The three bad boys in Lights Out are frightened into goodness by the 1965 Northeast Blackout, and Hank, the bicyclist in Down, Down, Down, Into the Valley of the Snake is startled by loneliness into clinging to his marriage.
Elizabeth Morris’s characters are sometimes racist or lonely or fat or confused or awesome, but always complex and both intuitively and authentically imagined. They are easily believable.
Many of these stories take place on or near the water. A child pokes among rockweed to find periwinkles; a New England divorcee concentrates on a limpet’s slime trail; ocean swells roil against cliffs on a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean; and off the coast of an island in the Aleutians in rough seas, a birdwatcher keeps his hand clamped to the gunwale of a small aluminum skiff.
Morris, a long-distance sailor, knows the sea and knows when to keep the foreground of her stories in the front and the background astern.
It’s the little things that make a short story into a big story. It’s the details and the intimacy. It’s the skillful knowing of the characters: their courage, obstinacy, fears, and resilience. In these stories we meet Josephine in Pal Jo and Linda in It’s a Long Time Pull, both holding to optimism like drowning sailors to flotsam. Amory, the man being robbed in an elevator in To Sketch a Thief is surprisingly and enchantingly thrilled by the encounter. The three bad boys in Lights Out are frightened into goodness by the 1965 Northeast Blackout, and Hank, the bicyclist in Down, Down, Down, Into the Valley of the Snake is startled by loneliness into clinging to his marriage.
Elizabeth Morris’s characters are sometimes racist or lonely or fat or confused or awesome, but always complex and both intuitively and authentically imagined. They are easily believable.
Many of these stories take place on or near the water. A child pokes among rockweed to find periwinkles; a New England divorcee concentrates on a limpet’s slime trail; ocean swells roil against cliffs on a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean; and off the coast of an island in the Aleutians in rough seas, a birdwatcher keeps his hand clamped to the gunwale of a small aluminum skiff.
Morris, a long-distance sailor, knows the sea and knows when to keep the foreground of her stories in the front and the background astern.
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