Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Still Life with Plums: Short Stories

Still Life with Plums is a vibrant collection of short stories that weaves together the outwardly distant lives of several strangers. With heaping doses of dark humor and magical realism, these ten stories enliven a cast of characters scattered throughout the southern portion of the United States. From West Virginians to Texans to Latinos, Still Life with Plums mines the lives of a Black-Irish West Virginian, a wise-cracking dog groomer, a guilt-ridden ambulance driver, a Guatemalan widow, a Japanese-Latin-American poster child for WWII reconciliation, and a meticulous predator. Marie Manilla's accessible prose is powerful and richly layered as she births a quirky ensemble that unflinchingly probes the human psyche.

"Marie Manilla's Still Life With Plums houses in its pages a repository of heartache and joy. Its soul lies in life's little moments, somehow still yet perpetually fleeing. Manilla's words take flight in the mind and dance like paper birds in the wind: Inevitably, the words will root inside the reader, like the memory of a fossil or a Polaroid picture, and once there, they will cease to be still. Just as the people in these stories, they will keep on humming."-Glenn Taylor, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

"This mesmerizing collection of stories is lull of my favorite things: brilliantly vivid characters, rich cultural textures, bleak humor. and surprising story turns. Manilla weaves a kind of literary magic that kept me reading late into the night."-Zod Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf and City of Veils

"Any reader who cares about mature, intelligent, graceful storytelling should be thinking very seriously about getting Still Life with Plums into their life: buy it, download it, check it out of the libraryùwhatever it takes to be able to read and savor and learn from Marie Manilla's tine and resonant stories"-Richard Currey, author of Fatal Light and Lost Highway

West Virginia native Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Calyx Journal, Kestrel, Portland Review, GSU Review, and other journals. She is the author of the upcoming novel Shrapnel, a Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel winner.