The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot
Beautifully-crafted prose from one of Michigan’s most original voices.

Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll's stories, "The guy can really write." And in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal.

The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll's range and understanding of human nature, and to how "the heart in conflict with itself" always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend's mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order — a voice as original as the stories he tells.

Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll's skill and insight on display in this unique collection.

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The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot
Beautifully-crafted prose from one of Michigan’s most original voices.

Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll's stories, "The guy can really write." And in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal.

The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll's range and understanding of human nature, and to how "the heart in conflict with itself" always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend's mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order — a voice as original as the stories he tells.

Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll's skill and insight on display in this unique collection.

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The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot

The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot

by Jack Driscoll
The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot

The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot

by Jack Driscoll

Paperback

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Overview

Beautifully-crafted prose from one of Michigan’s most original voices.

Elmore Leonard said about Jack Driscoll's stories, "The guy can really write." And in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, he once again demonstrates in every sentence the grace and grit of a true storyteller. The ten stories are mostly set in Michigan's northern lower peninsula, a landscape as gorgeous as it is severe. If at times the situations in these stories appear hopeless, the characters nonetheless, and even against seemingly impossible odds, dare to hope. These fictional individuals are so compassionately rendered that they can hardly help but be, in the hands of this writer, not only redeemed but made universal.

The stories are written from multiple points of view and testify to Driscoll's range and understanding of human nature, and to how "the heart in conflict with itself" always defines the larger, more meaningful story. A high school pitching sensation loses his arm in a public school classroom during show and tell. A woman lives all of her ages in one day. A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself alone after midnight in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with his best friend's mother. Driscoll is a prose stylist of the highest order — a voice as original as the stories he tells.

Lovers of contemporary storytelling will revel in Driscoll's skill and insight on display in this unique collection.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814342954
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication date: 04/03/2017
Series: Made in Michigan Writers Series
Pages: 176
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jack Driscoll is a two-time NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient and the author of eleven books, including the short story collections Wanting Only to Be Heard, winner of the AWP Short Fiction Award, and The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Wayne State University Press, 2012), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award and the Michigan Notable Book Award. His stories have appeared widely in journals, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and New Stories from the Midwest. He currently teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in Oregon.

What People are Saying About This

Laura Kasischke of the Infinitesimals

In this new collection, Jack Driscoll has proven himself again to be one of the finest fiction writers at work these days. His great gift is how uniquely he is able to bestow complexity upon his characters, complete their humanity with just this or that perfect detail, or gesture, or line of dialogue. Combined with the empathy that, as a writer, he shows for all of them, along with his sly eye for foibles and absurdities, reading his fiction feels like living it, and you come away from his pages under his influence, with a deeper vision of your own, feeling understood and better able to understand. There's no sentimentality in The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot, but Driscoll is able to see through others' eyes in a way few writers can, and his work adds to the world's store of compassion. And, such language! Without ever compromising the power and immediacy and pull of his stories, his sentences often just have to be reread and admired. There's everything in this book that a work of fiction can give us—suspense, and comfort, and conflict, and character, and poetry, and landscape, and sanity, and craziness. It's the kind of book that renews one's belief in the power and importance of books.

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