“Readers will appreciate the author’s dexterity with imperfect intimacies and untidy emotions.“ |
SYNOPSISWinner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Short Fiction in 1997, these carefully crafted and emotionally honest stories take on, through the smallest details, the largest themes: love, death, loss, exile, and growing up. Stunned by grief, a young archeologist turns away from romantic and professional possibilities. A fourth-grade spelling whiz makes sense of her father’s sudden departure through a fixation on a local marine park. A drug addict follows a stranger on the street for blocks, thinking she’s his estranged sister. A couple who seem to have nothing in common but sex get closer by, one night, not sleeping together. Each of the stories in The View from Below explores the risks and promise of intimacy, the tenuousness and tenacity of connection. PRAISE“Intricately detailed West Coast settings and a supple range of characters…. Readers will appreciate the author’s dexterity with imperfect intimacies and untidy emotions.” “Crittenden’s style of writing, deep and penetrating, is honestly stark … but the protagonists’ revelations—or lack thereof—are what make these stories so poignantly appealing to all who are interested in contemporary human drama. This debut collection is likely to haunt readers’ thoughts for a long, long time.” “Crittenden has an eye for what makes siblings one flesh and bone, for the pulse and rhythms that keep them together no matter what life has brought about to separate them.” “Crittenden’s beautiful debut reminds us that lurking right beneath the implacable routines and best-laid plans of all of us are ghosts and stubborn memories, the dead and the longed-for. In the end, though, it is the heart’s best reasons that triumph. This reader rises at the end and goes forth with a wise bliss.” “Lindsey Crittenden writes wonderful stories–sexy, lyric, beautifully crafted views of American life right now, the way it is.” –Max Byrd, author of Jefferson: A Novel. “Here is a wonderfully lyric short story writer, who gives a new twist to the possibilities of the genre.” |