Description: The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas--a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems--worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions--they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.
Review Quotes: "In Janice Obuchowski's stories, the woods surrounding a Vermont college town are as suffused with mystery and dread as any forest found in the Brothers Grimm. The characters adrift in these woods are viscerally alive and heartbreakingly real as they search for a route back to the world they knew. By situating the universal experience of bewilderment within one specifically observed woods, Obuchowski has crafted a genuine work of art."--Anthony Marra, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award