Rise
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Exceptionally compelling . . . even the stories without surreal contours seem to be set in a world that is not quite our own.” —New York Daily News
The stories in Rise are fairytales, except that the witch, lucky Hans, and the frog prince are characters at the fringes of everyday life. There are rockets, swells of starlings, and children who disappear into thin air. L. Annette Binder writes magical tales with authority and restraint, and we believe her stories, every one.
“In one of these amazing stories a character says to her husband, ‘Why are you smiling? You’re scaring me.’ That’s how I feel about Rise. There is a yearning so deep in each story, something beautiful and urgent, that the book glows. L. Annette Binder arrives with worlds of empathy and strange surprise.” —Ron Carlson
“L. Annette Binder is a stunningly talented writer. Her stories are the stories of outsiders, gripping and heartfelt, heightened with hidden undertones of the surreal. It is this tension that makes the worlds she creates so vibrant, and allows her readers to see so deeply into these characters’ souls. Rise is a beautiful book, and Binder’s words cut clear and straight to the bone.” —Hannah Tinti
“She both casts a spell and breaks it. To experience Rise is to experience wonder.” —Laura Kasischke
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether the situations in Binder's debut story collection (winner of the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction) are distortions of the plausible, such as the gigantic woman in "Nephilim" (which won a Pushcart Prize) who builds a long, bittersweet bond with a neighborhood boy who grows up doing odd jobs for her, or are rooted firmly in the everyday, such as "Tremble," ostensibly about a disagreement between neighbors, the characters are enmeshed in a mingling of the spiritual and the nightmarish. Moments of epiphany are understated and rarely joyful: "His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look" (from "Nephilim"); "He reached across the table and saw his reflection in the dark window glass, and he cried" (from "Mourning the Departed"). The complex interweaving of themes, rendered through precise detail, is akin to a powerful subterranean disturbance that sends seismographs jumping but leaves few visible effects. The subdued tone transcends the mundane, as in "Galatea," in which the mother of a woman grieving her missing daughter says, "People didn't go to the cemetery to visit the dead. They went to visit their memories." The possibility of communication is fleeting but desired; as a visionary boy notes in "Halo," "it's good to have somebody who will listen even if they don't understand."
