The Glass City and Other Stories

by Jen Knox

Overview

Winner of Prize Americana for Prose, Jen Knox’s The Glass City and Other Stories is a shrewd yet playful collection that explores the dangers of extremes with a subtle, skillful elegance. In these sixteen stories, weather becomes a mirror for the internal struggles of Knox's indelible cast of characters. An aging acrobat looks for connectivity online as her city floods, two sisters are tasked to spread their mother's ashes on flowers that no longer exist, a man's scars become tattoos as he attempts to outrun truth, a reluctant host shares an island's secrets, and families survive natural disasters that shake out lies and bury inhibitions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996777940
Publisher:	Press Americana
Publication date:	07/14/2017
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

The Glass City | 1

The Living Museum | 12

Gather the Ingredients | 19

Running Toward the Sun | 43

Don’t Tease the Elephants | 68

The Couple on the Roof | 74

The Inconvenience of It All | 87

A Handbook for Single Mothers | 92

A Perpetual State of Awe | 110

Nebraska | 120

Green | 126

West on N Road | 136

Fortune in Smoke | 151

Our Sky, the Ocean | 159

The Slope of a Line | 163

Acknowledgments | 171

About the Author | 172

Editorial Reviews

SHEILA BLACK (IRON, ARDENT): Jen Knox is a fearless writer. She can describe a Toledo community decimated by apocalyptic drought, a bakery in Nice during a terrorist attack, a surreal museum of living statues, and make every one of these things feel as real and intimate as your favorite worn-in flannel shirt. Acutely alert to the smallest moments that reveal character, her stories can give you a whole life in a few short paragraphs, laid bare in all its sorrow, glory, and restless longing. She can work dialogue, twist a plot, make you laugh out loud, and then break your heart. The Glass City speaks to the America of now as urgently as Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser did in their day, but with a touch of magic that only makes the reality beneath that much more haunting.

MELISSA STUDDARD (I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST): Jen Knox is a master cartographer of the human psyche. In the stories of The Glass City, she maps the depths and complexity of the human mind against the backdrop of a future so possible yet so surreal that it’s nearly futile to try to set the book down. I kept telling myself, just one more page before bed, just one more story—until I found myself turning the last page in the middle of the night, having forgotten to eat dinner. Ultimately, The Glass City is the miracle of artistic imagination at its absolute peak: read casually, it thrills and entertains us with insightful depictions of who we are; read deeply, it shows us who we can become.

RALPH PENNEL (EDITOR OF MIDWAY JOURNAL): The works found in Jen Knox’s story collection, The Glass City, are unquestionably and supremely satisfying. And, never has a story collection been so aptly named, as the pieces here get at the ways in which we are fragile, transparent, and formed from the unforgiving heat of conflict (internal and applied) and tension. Just as importantly, however, these stories are also about reprieve, about perseverance, about the ways we are structurally sound against the strongest gales and the greatest tremors, raised from the hard labor waged from even stronger unions.

From the Publisher