In this exquisite debut short story collection, people with unusual jobs and lives embark on extraordinary journeys. A taboo romance breaks the laws of gravity. Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he abandoned. A female physicist meets Stephen Hawking in a bar. . . . In the closing novella, All Those Stairs, an elevator operator with a genius IQ rides up and down all day enclosed in a metal box. Author Erin Stalcup explores these lives with remarkable compassion, depth, and insight examining loss and longing, and how our bodies and minds can be both weighted and freed. And Yet It Moves is a powerful combination of both absurdist and realist-stories that literally defy gravity.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Gravity
In the Heart of the Heart of the Empire
Keen
With Strangers
Ghost Writer
Not Long for this World
Ochre Is the Color of Deserts and Dried Blood
Brightest Corners
Why Things Fall
I. Newton
II. Einstein
III. Tesla
IV. Galileo, Hawking, Rabinowitz
All Those Stairs
Credits
About the Author :
Erin Stalcup's fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, H_NGM_N, Hobart, [PANK], and elsewhere.
Review :
"An engaging collection that takes on the love and loneliness lurking in the bright lights and shadowed corners of the everyday."—Kirkus Reviews
"The ever-present, everyday magic in Stalcup's debut collection overlays the mundane world like mist and blurs the lines between the prosaic and the fantastic, in stories that examine life and loss. . . Stalcup's fabulist prose-poetry takes readers on tours of today's dreams and Nikola Tesla's memories, her writing surreal but solid enough for the reader to lean against."—Publishers Weekly
"In Erin Stalcup's And Yet It Moves, science, physics, and electricity (the reliably immutable phenomena that connect our universe) are the background for short stories of startling human disconnection and alienation . . . The beauty in each story is that, though alienation has become the default in each character's life, the desire to connect is ever present, like a beating heart, no matter how bruised."—ForeWord Reviews
"Often, Stalcup succeeds at making those invisible visible . . . by reminding readers of the inherent humanity in persons, objects, places, animals, or—yes—natural phenomena. . . . Again and again, these stories show the imperfection of human connection, that invisible and yet visible forces at work in our lives."—Diagram
"Erin Stalcup has written a collection of stories and a novella that show us what metaphor and magic can do and why both are so vital to our human reality. The collection manages to be both sexy and scientific and pushes us to rethink easy aesthetic values. In And Yet it Moves even a wake of feeding vultures is transcendent in its beauty."—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning
"Brace yourself for Erin Stalcup's uncanny access to heretofore unknown forces, strange particles, and hidden dimensions. Mourners and exotic dancers, elevator operators and scientists—Stalcup explores each of her characters with remarkable compassion, depth, and insight. These virtuosic stories defy gravity and genre with equal aplomb, utterly transforming our sense of the world we thought we knew."—Tim Horvath, author of Understories
"Erin Stalcup's intelligent, provocative stories grow inside your mind and body long after you have absorbed their marvelous inward and outward views of the individual heart and the human community. These stories cast you into the darkest dreams, and they startle you awake. Like all mystical experiences, And Yet It Moves opens your heart by breaking it."—Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop
"And Yet It Moves is an exquisite collection, a breath of new air, fresh and sparkling. What pleasure in seeing our world as Erin Stalcup does, the magic revealed in among the mundane, in accepted laws of nature, in the weary human heart—which in these stories is repeatedly revived. A gift to us all, this is a lyrical winning argument for adoring the 'gleaming and grotesque' beauty of our fragile, surprising lives. Bravo!"—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
"Erin Stalcup is a writer new to me, and I am happy to make her literary acquaintance in this strong collection of stories suggesting an important new literary innovator. These stories are original in concept and execution, clearly informed but not constrained by contemporary trends in fiction. The narrative sensibility is intelligent and highly personal, attuned to all that is askew in contemporary culture but nonetheless especially interested in acts of generosity and kindness. Stalcup is a writer who manages to suggest the possibility of goodness without sacrificing a tough-minded insistence on reporting foibles and follies, often of the comic variety."—Valerie Sayers, author of The Powers: A Novel
"Stalcup offers readers a world viewed through a filter—one in which the forces of love can counteract the forces of gravity, and where even the most hardened ghostwriters are eventually haunted by their own words. Part parable, part cautionary tale, these stories are sure to stun the heart, steal the breath, and leave readers in that wondrously uncharted terrain between the grotesque and the sublime."—BJ Hollars, author of This Is Only a Test
"Simply put: these stories defy gravity. Step aside Newton, And Yet it Moves assigns Stalcupian laws of motion and movement, and is sure to pull its readers in."—Zachary Tyler Vickers, author of Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!
