Possession (s)
A New Short Story Collection from John Smolens
Possession (s)
In settings familiar and foreign, from the shores of the Great Lakes, to rural Ireland and Scotland, the boulevards of 19th-century Paris, and an ancient Italian hill-town, John Smolens’ stories delineate his protagonists’ fears, doubts, and uncertainties, tempered by irony, humor, and tenacity. The collection’s title, Possession(s), suggests an overarching duality that connects these fourteen disparate narratives, which include stories first published in magazines such as the North American Review, the Madison Review, and the Southern Review, alongside new and never-before-published narratives. In “prose that is an understated marvel” (Publishers Weekly), and through a wide range of compelling voices, each story resonates with compassion and honesty, often turning on unexpected encounters with a stranger, a place, the past, and often with oneself, offset by a recognition that the future holds few assurances other than the promise of mortality. Through their search for love, reconciliation, and acceptance, the characters in Possession(s) strive to find understanding and peace.
What Others are Saying about “Possession (s)”
“A good story’s a kind of miracle,” John Smolens writes in this book, and it’s as good a description as you’re going to get: no one needs a story exactly until you do, and when you do it’d better be good, as these stories are, it’s hard not to be a little shocked by the encounter. Smolens loves conversations. What fills the spaces between people is his medium: the awkwardnesses, the surprise intimacies, the slights and turns, the space between intention and action and lingering regret and disappearance and reencounter, all the charged spaces in which we address and forget and remember one another. You will remember these stories for a long time. —Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities
When you open John Smolen’s Possession(s) to start reading, prepare yourself. You will be entering a world unlike any other. You will travel everywhere from an identity-shattering upper Michigan town to catechistic Boston to dung-strewn 19th century Paris and myriad places beyond. The stories in this book chill, elate, amaze, shock, splinter and awe, with breath-taking intensity. Yet what connects them is the frenetic, living energy contained within each of them. Possession(s) is a gem by one of Michigan’s, no strike that, one of America’s masters. —Michael Zadoorian, author of The Leisure Seeker
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