Description: These deceptively simple stories share two commonalities--first, each one ends in the name of a town that ends in "field." Second, most of the stories contain a crime in a magical landscape in the Pioneer Valley.lley.
Brief description: Stephen Billias is the author of seven published science fiction/fantasy novels, including The American Book of the Dead and Quest for the Thirty-Six, both published by Warner Books. Mr. Billias has also written several screenplays. In 2005 he sold a film treatment with director/writer John Harrison to The Walt Disney Company for Disney's Animated Features Division. In 2009, Mr. Billias co-produced the documentary Seeking the 36 with director/writer Dennis Lanson. Mr. Billias lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He is married and has a daughter Sophia, a law school student at Case Western Reserve. His hobbies include backpacking trips to the Grand Canyon and the Sierra Nevada range, and the practice of Shintaido, a Japanese body movement and martial art. From 2006 to 2016, Mr. Billias and his wife Bela Breslau operated the Shintaido Farm, a center for the practice of Shintaido.
Review Quotes:
A Book of Fields is a marvelous, wry, exuberant collection of stories, filled with the human and the magical. I love how each story is its own "field," ready to surprise and move you, as you walk into it. A witty and inspiring fictional portrait of this region of New England.
Harriet Scott Chessman, author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and The Beauty of Ordinary Things.
Billias' A Book of Fields is a charming and compelling collection of the absurd, the gentle, the ridiculous, the generous, the miserly. Humanity writ small as seen through the lens of a region he clearly loves and has defined so vividly by its characters. Even as a recent New England transplant, I recognized them all.
John Harrison, Writer/Director in film & TV: Dune, the Miniseries, Tales from the Darkside. Author of the novel Destiny Gardens.