Fair Augusto and Other Stories

by Laura Kalpakian

Overview

FAIR AUGUSTO AND OTHER STORIES, Laura Kalpakian's first collection of short fiction shows remarkable breadth and depth. The settings, moods, themes and characters who inhabit these stories display enviable artistic range. "Hunters in the Fields of August" follows the fates and fortunes of a family of Italian Jews fleeing Mussolini. "Veteran's Day" (winner of the Stand International Short Fiction Competition) chronicles a disturbed veteran's return to his hometown. The title piece explores a lost lover whose suicide reverberates across lives and continents. Winner of the Pen West Best Short Fiction, these are stories to savor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798988378709
Publisher:	Paint Creek Press
Publication date:	06/20/2023
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

Laura Kalpakian is the author of seventeen works of fiction (novels, novellas and story collections) in the US, the UK, and translated into languages abroad. Paint Creek Press has recently reissued a trilogy of St. Elmo books, These Latter Days, Caveat and the story collection, Dark Continent. Her first nonfiction book, Memory Into Memoir: a Writer's Handbook (University of New Mexico Press) won the 2022 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Awards. Winner of an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the PEN West Award, and the Anahid Award for an American writer of Armenian descent, Laura Kalpakian also twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award. Her novel, American Cookery was nominated for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has served as a regular book critic for both the Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury News. She has held artists' residencies at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, the Montalvo Center for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native Californian, Laura Kalpakian was educated on both the east and west coasts with a BA and an MA in history. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Editorial Reviews

Kalpakian, author of the novel These Latter Days ( LJ 2/1/85), here gives us a collection of short fiction. In it she deals unerringly with several worlds: immigrant, intellectual, blue-collar, American, foreign. Many of the stories concern the death of love, sometimes from the viewpoint of the one who leaves, sometimes of the one who is left. In ``Fair Augusto,'' Jessie McCarren, married, presently living in Venice, and writing successful mystery novels, meets a vacationing American professor, causing her to recall the handsome, failed poet who took her love but refused commitment. Shattered by their affair Jessie had left him and painfully rebuilt her life. These are accessible stories with the feeling of time passing, of people changing, of falling in love and moving beyond. Recommended. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.

Library Journal