Description: To be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that perhaps we are sleepwalking--that's what life can be like for the people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and narrative daring.
Brief description: PETER LASALLE, 2006 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner for Tell Borges If You See Him, is the author of eight previous books, including both novels and short story collections--most recently Sleeping Mask: Fictions and The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling. His fiction and essays have been selected for several award anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Travel Writing, Sports Best Short Stories, Best of the West, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett, in his native Rhode Island.
Review Quotes:
Peter LaSalle writes about time that collides or implodes. Such collisions are never simply artful; rather, operating from inside his characters while still maintaining a sharp-eyed distance (even with first-person narratives), he dramatizes their complex dislocations--temporal, spatial, and emotional. LaSalle's characters move about in a state that straddles waking and sleeping, but the emotions they experience are real and run deep. . . . This writer owes a huge debt to Borges, certainly, but there's nothing tired or derivative about the imaginative world he has crafted. Regardless of his stories' settings-from Boston to Paris-there's an all-American brashness and brio.
--Georgia Review