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The high places stories

"What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that h...

Full description

Main Author: McFarlane, Fiona, 1978- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Edition: First American edition.
Subjects:
Short stories.
Summary: "What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on at six. So begins "Mycenae," a story in The High Places, Fiona McFarlane's first story collection. Her stories skip across continents, eras, and genres to chart the borderlands of emotional life. In "Mycenae," she describes a middle-aged couple's disastrous vacation with old friends. In "Good News for Modern Man," a scientist lives on a small island with only a colossal squid and the ghost of Charles Darwin for company. And in the title story, an Australian farmer turns to Old Testament methods to relieve a fatal drought. Each story explores what Flannery O'Connor called "mystery and manners." The collection dissects the feelings--longing, contempt, love, fear--that animate our existence and hints at a reality beyond the smallness of our lives. Salon's Laura Miller called McFarlane's The Night Guest "a novel of uncanny emotional penetration. How could anyone so young portray so persuasively what it feels like to look back on a lot more life than you can see in front of you?" The High Places is further evidence of McFarlane's preternatural talent, a debut collection that reads like the selected works of a literary great"--Provided by publisher.
Physical Description: 280 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN: 9780865478046
086547804X
Author Notes: Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, Australia in 1978. She received a PhD from Cambridge University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in several publications including The New Yorker. Her books include The Night Guest and The High Places, which won the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2016 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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