In settings familiar and foreign, from the shores of the Great Lakes to rural Ireland and Scotland, the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris, and an ancient Italian hill town, John Smolens’s stories delineate our fears, doubts, and uncertainties, tempered by irony, humor, and tenacity. The collection’s title, Possession(s), suggests an overarching duality that connects these fourteen disparate narratives, which include stories first published in magazines such as the North American Review, the Madison Review, and the Southern Review. In “prose that is an understated marvel” (Publishers Weekly) and through a wide range of compelling voices, each story resonates with compassion and honesty, often turning on unexpected encounters with a stranger, a place, the past, and sometimes with oneself, offset by a recognition that the future holds few assurances other than the promise of mortality. In their search for love, reconciliation, and acceptance, the characters in Possession(s) strive to find understanding and peace.
Table of Contents:
1 Spies
20 The End of the World
38 Among the Beasts
54 Whistler’s Mistress
65 Post-modern
72 True Confession
82 One One Thousand
94 Superior Noir
108 Barney
122 Crustaceans
136 Mezzanotte
154 Night Train to Chicago
165 Clochán
178 Possession(s)
181 Acknowledgments
About the Author :
John Smolens has published thirteen works of fiction: twelve novels and a collection of short stories. Three of his novels, Wolf’s Mouth, Day of Days, and A Cold, Hard Prayer, were selected as Library of Michigan Notable Books. He lives in Marquette, Michigan.
Review :
“Smolens’s prose . . . is an understated marvel.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“‘A good story’s a kind of miracle,’ John Smolens writes in this book, and it’s as good a description as you’re going to get. No one needs a story exactly until you do, and when we do, it’d better be good, as these are. A Smolens story loves conversations. What fills the spaces between people is his medium: the awkwardnesses, the surprise intimacies, the slights and turns, the space between intention and action, and lingering regret and disappearance—all the charged spaces in which we address and remember one another. You will remember these stories.” —Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities
“When you open John Smolens’s Possession(s) to start reading, prepare yourself. You will be entering a world unlike any other. You will travel everywhere from an identity-shattering Upper Michigan town to catechistic Boston to dung-strewn nineteenth-century Paris and myriad places beyond. The stories in this book chill, elate, amaze, shock, splinter, and awe, with breathtaking intensity. Yet what connects them is the frenetic, living energy contained within each of them. Possession(s) is a gem by one of Michigan’s, no strike that, one of America’s masters.” —Michael Zadoorian, author of The Leisure Seeker
