PositiveNew York Journal of BooksThe gems of this collection are its short stories ... The fiction and nonfiction found here offer the reader a trove of portraits and tales.
Caitlin Horrocks
RaveThe New York Journal of Books... stellar ... The narrators throughout the book, whether singular or plural, though often first person, come to feel familiar, like old friends. Even an unfamiliar voice reads like a friendly stranger sidling up to you at a bar ... Horrocks proves herself a master of locating the identity of a place, evoking tone, and summoning a character with a single, authenticating detail ... Horrocks has charted the town’s economic rise and collapse, in concrete terms, in a sentence. Few writers have this power. Fewer still channel it reliably, story after story, without fail. Better yet, the author has imagined a delicious setting, a defunct drugstore where people check out the latest Grisham, but she has resisted the urge to write a story around it. One writer’s premise, after all, is another’s throwaway detail ... brims with other standout stories ... refreshingly, Horrocks’ stories are stories interested in work. Her cast includes farmers, nurses, office workers, a bartender, a teacher, a healthcare worker, a realtor, a banker, a tour guide, the titular terranauts, and a whole cast of white and blue collar workers ... In comparison to Horrocks’ exceptional first collection, the stories of Life Among the Terranauts are perhaps less carefully organized. While the earlier collection gains momentum with the age of its characters, narrators growing older as the stories advance, this book feels less orderly, or, if there is a scaffolding, it’s subtle enough to be easily missed ... while no book is perfect, there isn’t a bad story in this book ... The collection is pristine, and, while the stories are thematically at home alongside Horrocks’ previous work, they are unquestionably an artistic and technical leap beyond.
David James Poissant
RaveThe Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionLake Life, establishes Poissant as one of the South\'s best new writers working today. It is a dazzling work that is so confidently crafted, so keenly perceptive and so deeply compassionate, it\'s hard to believe it was written by someone this early in his career. The premise is elegant in its simplicity ... One of the things that makes Lake Life so captivating is Poissant’s ability to take this knotty situation and, in surprising and organic ways, make profound observations about some of life’s bigger questions. Everything from politics and religion to the meaning of art and the secret to happiness is explored through the Starling family’s fractured prism.
