GREAT STORY COLLECTIONS

In the collections of stories below I've found myself moved again and again to consider art as a pathway tofinding meaning in the world. Clicking on the book titles will take you to Amazon.com.
 
ROCK SPRINGS by Richard Ford 
Master of dirty realism, narrative density, and clarity and depth of prose, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford depicts the low down frightfully real existence of our emptiness and how like fragile vessels we are.  We exist under the simple straightforward conception we have freedom to grow, expand, and illumine the world with color, yet we are so often bound to the mundane by fate, or destiny.  As artful in it’s reach as Wildlife, Ford’s beautiful small book of awe-invoking portent, Rock Springs delivers. 

LABORS OF THE HEART by Claire Davis
A prose stylist extraordinaire with a light and fluid touch concerning the heart of humanity, Claire Davis exposes a vein of hidden resolve in the secret folds of her characters' interior lives.  Her discipline as an artist, enveloped by a great sense of the mystery of the human endeavor and graced by a caring hand, is a golden thread of illumination in the title story and throughout the collection.  Davis’ work, selected for Best American Short Stories and a Pushcart Prize, is rich with alienation, secrecy, the nuances of power, and the subtle ascendancy of love. 

FAMOUS FATHERS by Pia Z. Ehrhardt 
Winner of the Narrative Prize, Pia Z. Ehrhardt creates landscapes of the physical world and the heart that are equally vivid, lush and invigorating.  As adept with universal human understanding as she is with the wild, uncontrolled, and brilliant nature of the feminine, Ehrhardt’s authorial light infuses her stories and sends readers into the space of the forbidden, a liminal encounter with secrecy, intimacy, loyalty, and power.  With stories in McSweeney’s, Narrative Magazine, Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and Wild Strawberries, her work evokes the pursuit of self and other in a contemporary fusion of that which is at once female and daunting.     

THE WOMAN LIT BY FIREFLIES by Jim Harrison
Prolific novelist (Legends of the Fall), screenwriter, poet (The Theory and Practice of Rivers), and short story writer, Jim Harrison embeds people in landscape and weaves through torque of narrative, prose, and emotional import a web of intricate and compelling design.  The Woman Lit by Fireflies, the final novella of this collection, generously explores ingenuity, freedom, and loyalty.

LOST IN THE CITY by Edward P. Jones 
An artist whose prose and narrative arcs generate irresistible pull and evoke in readers a genuine sense of entire worlds, Edward P. Jones has written two books.  The first, Lost in the City, garnered the PEN/Hemingway award.  The second, The Known World, won the Pulitzer Prize.  African American, a luminary of American letters, Jones affirms that which is humble and human, and does so with startling power.  In the words of MLK he has a “heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

CLOSE RANGE by Annie Proulx 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News and known for vigorous mercurial prose, Annie Proulx takes readers on a journey of speed and destiny in Close Range.  Her ability to uncover and dissipate the dead waters of American culture, providing a rich love of character and story in the process, is replete with momentum and artistry.  Her stories burn like bonfires in the darkness of a vast literary plain. 

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O’Brien 
Bare, raw, and inscrutable in his narrations of American violence, Tim O’Brien’s prose, gentle and incantatory, persuades us of our will to find meaning and each other even in the most brutal of contexts.  Winner of the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, O’Brien reconciles the extremes of human existence, ultimate service and ultimate war, in the common lives of the men who populate The Things They Carried.