This week’s other featured books, “Learning Dangerously,” by C. Fong Hsiung and “To Zenzi,” by Robert L. Shuster, can be found by scrolling down below this post, along with the “First Tuesday Replay.” Or, just click the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: How to Walk on Water and Other Stories.
PUBLISHED IN: 2020
THE AUTHOR: Rachel Swearingen.
THE EDITOR: David Bowen.
THE PUBLISHER: New American Press, a small press in Milwaukee, WI that publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books, as well as the New from the Midwest series. Each year they choose and publish one story and one poetry collection for the New American Press prizes.
SUMMARY: How to Walk on Water and Other Stories presents stories that bristle with menace and charm with intimate revelations. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who turns the rooms of her apartment into eerie art installations. An au pair imagines her mundane life as film noir, endangering the infant in her care. A down-on-his-luck son moves in with his elderly mother and tries to piece together the brutal attack she survived when he was a baby. Through nimble prose and considerable powers of observation, Swearingen takes us from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Northern Michigan, to Seattle, Venice, and elsewhere. She explores not only what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and uncertainty, but also how to celebrate what is most alive.
THE BACK STORY: The book took nearly a decade to write, although I was also working on other stories and books. My original vision was to put together a loosely connected, collection of stories inspired by visual art and a sense of being haunted, but over time other themes emerged. In the end, I cut several stories and rearranged and retitled the book. The resulting project is more condensed and moodier, and yet still has some of my original desire for stories that are playful and lean toward the surreal. Crime fiction, film noir, art installations, entomology, and ghosts figure prominently.
WHY THIS TITLE?: The title comes from the title of the stories, in which a character remembers being a child and trying to walk on water. When I thought about the other stories, I realized all the characters were trying to do this too, move forward through uncertainty, stay aloft despite all of their miscalculations and mistakes.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Readers who enjoy spare short stories that play with genre and are by turns dark and quirky should appreciate this book.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“The stories in Swearingen’s disconcerting and promising debut explore themes of violence, chance and the consolations of imagination.” — New York Times Book Review
“The nine stories in Swearingen’s auspicious debut showcase a gift for well-placed, revealing details…. Each of the intriguing entries builds suspense before a gratifying or lingering payoff. This crafty collection is worth a look.”— Publishers Weekly
Masterful [….] Always in Swearingen’s intriguing stories, this unsettling drift toward the unknown, the unknowable. — Anthony Bukowski, The Star Tribune
AUTHOR PROFILE: Rachel Swearingen’s stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, she has lived in Seattle, Santa Fe, Minneapolis, and Kalamazoo, MI, and elsewhere. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. A recipient of the New American Press Fiction Prize, the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction, she lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: With this collection, I sought to play with the line between the real and the imagined, and to think more about how art, and the things we humans create, bleed into and alter our experiences of our everyday lives. SAMPLE: You can read a full story at Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/advice-for-the-haunted-by-rachel-swearingen/
LOCAL OUTLETS: The Book Cellar in Chicago / Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis.
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & noble, etc.
PRICE: $14.95.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: http://www.rachelswearingen.com/contact Twitter: rachelswearinge
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 