This Far Isn't Far Enough: Stories

by Lynn Sloan

Overview

A once-successful Lowcountry cook seeks a comeback with a popup restaurant in his shabby apartment. A shady estate appraiser meets his match in a cagey widower who refuses to part with an antique clock he desperately wants. A countrywoman, dismayed by her daughter's decision to become a prizefighter, turns to her dead mother for guidance. In this beautifully written collection of fourteen stories, characters seek to reset their lives knocked sideways by failure, betrayal, or chance, only to be ensnared by pasts they can't escape. Haunting and deeply moving, This Far Isn't Far Enough demonstrates Lynn Sloan's penetrating understanding of loss, endurance, and the undefeated spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944388294
Publisher:	Fomite
Publication date:	09/28/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and American Literary Review, among other publications, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the novel Principles of Navigation (2015 Fomite). Her fine art photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where she founded the journal Occasional Readings in Photography, and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband.

Editorial Reviews

2017-11-28
Fourteen stories of revelations that come too late.The pieces in Sloan's (Principles of Navigation, 2015) character-driven collection often alternate between flashback and the present, showing with powerful economy of language how people arrived at where they are now. In "Bird," Martha is recently widowed, and her children and grandchildren are staying with her for her husband Owen's funeral as she becomes distracted by memories of her late lover, Glenn. Like many stories in the book, "Bird" ends abruptly. There is an emotional climax that might have served as the beginning of Martha's journey but comes instead on the penultimate page. Indeed, in "Bird," the discovery comes too late to change anything for the protagonist. The same holds true of "Lost and Found." Lauren's memories of her difficult and vain mother interrupt the present action where she is dealing with her mother's sudden death. When, after traveling to Thailand, Lauren learns something truly unexpected, she, like Martha, is left making sense of a relationship that has already ended with death. Elsewhere in the collection, however, this formula does not serve as clear a purpose, and the abrupt endings risk frustrating the reader. The framed narrative of "A Paris Story" and the mother-son tale of "Safe" also end where they might have only begun. Still, Sloan's characters are rendered with sensitive and realistic detail throughout. In "Sunshine Every Day," the final story, yet another widow's vision of the present is clouded by a fog of regret. The drama is evoked along with the mundane: "The kettle shrieked. The clock in the dining room chimed the half-hour. She wished she had lived a different life."Stories that illustrate how life can look drastically different in retrospect.

Kirkus Reviews