Available Light - Softcover

Eighteen tragicomic short stories that explore love, tragedy, and loss. As he disassembles an infant's nursery, a father struggles for ways to tell his young daughter her brother is dead; a boy learns the truth about his parents' divorce; an out of work rock musician finds himself custodian of an abandoned child; a wife who sets out to find her husband's secret lover discovers a secret she's kept from herself; while settling their estranged father's estate, adult sisters encounter a side of their parents they never knew; a ne'er-do-well uncle pays the price for putting his young nephew's life at risk; a widow discovers that her need for love lives beyond the man she loved; a fifteen-year-old boy seeks to know his older brother who is away at war. Although the characters often lack the navigational tools for finding and sustaining meaningful love, they all courageously follow the path illuminated by whatever light is available to them.

Phillip Gardner is a professor of English at Francis Marion University. His short stories have won awards from the South Carolina Fiction Project, the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open, and the Pushcart Prize. With original appearances in journals, including the North American Review, New Delta Review, LIT, Interim, The Chattahoochee Review, and others, his stories have been anthologized into four collections by Bitingduck Press/Boson Books: Someone To Crawl Back To (2003), Somebody Wants Somebody Dead (2012), AVAILABLE LIGHT (2013), and THE FUTURE NEVER LASTS (2016)