A collection of truly brilliant short stories, each depicting the deeply personal experience of a universal or historical event. Momentous fiction from the best American writer of his generation.
A group of housewives smoke cigars and play cards whilst a tornado approaches a west Texas town. An Asian-American medic bicycles through the Vietnam countryside with her husband and son and returns to the spot where she once held dying soldiers. Or a young rockabilly aficionado prepares for a date in a Ukranian village close to Chenobyl. The words of Beatles songs sung in a Cambodian work camp.
Cullin's ability is to miraculously create moments of true pathos which distill important human experience into a single hair-raising image. I can honestly say they are the best stories I have ever read, they are chillingly good and I have utter conviction that this is a great writer.
A group of housewives smoke cigars and play cards whilst a tornado approaches a west Texas town; an Asian-American medic bicycles through the Vietnam countryside with her husband and son, returning to the spot where she once held dying soldiers. A young rockabilly aficionado prepares for a date in a Ukranian village close to Chernobyl; the words of a Beatles' song ring out in a Cambodian work camp.
This is a collection of truly brilliant short stories, desolate but uplifting, each depicting the deeply personal experience of a universal or historical event. Momentous fiction from the best American writer of his generation. Cullin's ability is to miraculously create moments of true pathos which distil important human experience into a single hair-raising image.
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[back flap]
Mitch Cullin was born in 1968 in New Mexico. He is the author of four novels: Whompyjawed (1999), Branches (2000), Tideland (2000), and The Cosmology of Bing (2001). He has been the recipient of many awards and honours, including a Dodge Jones Foundation grant and a poetry fellowship from The Arizona Commission of the Arts.
Every time he focuses on the one character who can best tell of a larger tragedy. He finds the perfect narrator... brave, highly imagined fiction writing.