The Woods

The Woods Stories - John Simmons Short Fiction Award

Paperback (10 Nov 2022)

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Publisher's Synopsis

The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas-a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems-worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions-they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.

What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that's somehow gotten by all these years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable.

Book information

ISBN: 9781609388751
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Imprint: University of Iowa Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 813.6
DEWEY edition: 23/eng/20220318
Language: English
Number of pages: 195
Weight: 363g
Height: 210mm
Width: 140mm
Spine width: 18mm