Bending Heaven

by Jessica Francis Kane

Overview

Set in the United States and London, this debut collection introduces us to a cast of characters, some anguished in their pursuit of impractical dreams, others struggling to make sense of their failures. A mathematician who has forsaken everything in order to prove a theory; an older woman author achieving fame late in life; a guilt-ridden mother struggling to impress her teenage daughter; an unhappy lawyer attempting to survive a corporate retreat with dignity—all are ambitious and passionate, but to their dismay find themselves at odds with the pattern of their lives. Attempting to make a new beginning or heal a hurt, they are thwarted by embarrassing impulsiveness or a sudden lack of faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582432069
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	06/26/2002
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report, was chosen as one of the Best Reads 2012 for the Channel 4 TV Book Club. She is also the author of two story collections, Bending Heaven and This Close. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.

Editorial Reviews

The 11 stories in this slim, sophisticated volume...offer readers an extraordinarily wide range of characters and themes.

Jessica Francis Kane write(s) in the tradition of Alice Munro or Russell Banks - stories that are small windows onto ordinary, troubled lives.

Newsday

Kane's sparse but poignant writing satisfies...these heartrending stories will convince even the optimist that some sad stories need telling.

San Francisco Chronicle

Kane's debut collection is achingly, pitch-perfectly sad, detailing painful adult awkwardness and the lost respect of beloved children.

U.S. News & World Report

So, general public, feel free to plunge into Kane's work...You'll be thrilled at what you find: short stories that are bright, elegant, graceful and imaginative.

Buffalo News

Each story...captures these people...in the troublesome middle of unbearable sameness and the untidiness of life....Well-written and entirely credible.

Seattle Times

Eleven downbeat stories, five published previously, from newcomer Kane: blues variations that form an insistent but eloquent study of faces of quiet desperation. There are the drinkers: Sarah, first, in "Evidence of Old Repairs," whose efforts to connect with her teenaged daughter while on a family holiday in London are complicated by the memories both have of Sarah's rum-and-Coke afternoons at home; and then Shelley, in "Refuge," an aging associate in a prominent Washington law firm, who attends the firm's weekend retreat days after having sent her teenager away to live with his dad, no longer able to cope with him, and who binges her way through the pain. And there are the seekers: The mathematician in "The Arnold Proof," at 46 close to the twilight of his career, close to cracking the proof of the notorious Riemann Hypothesis, but also closer than ever to cracking up when he has an epiphany in an interstate rest area; and the publicist in "How to Become a Publicist," a midwestern girl lured by New York publishing, who quickly tires of the inanity of it all and applies to grad school. And then there are those for whom objects have assumed unnatural significance: Lena in "Ideas of Home, but Not the Thing Itself," a newlywed who covets the furnishings of the Georgetown house she and her young husband are sitting; and the young boy in "First Sale," faced with his mother's determination to get rid of stuff after his father leaves them, but who cannot bear to part with a bottle of Maryland lake water he had scooped up at the end of a family vacation. These characters, along with others equally on edge, give voice to the ceaseless yearnings that-so Kane's volume suggests-preoccupy us almostfrom the cradle to the grave. Lovers of lighthearted fiction, fear to tread here.

Kirkus Reviews