Description:
In Table for Two, Eliot Parker explores human connection through suspenseful Appalachian stories where conversation is power, silence is weaponized, and relationships teeter between intimacy and control. A gripping collection.
Brief description: Eliot Parker is the author of four thriller novels, most recently A Final Call, which was named A Best Book to Discover in 2022 by Kirkus Magazine and was a finalist for The Hawthorne Prize for fiction. His short story collection Snapshots won the PenCraft and Feathered Quill Book Awards for best short story anthology. A recipient of the West Virginia Literary Merit Award, Eliot hosts the author podcast program, Now, Appalachia on The Authors on the Air Global Radio Network. He teaches writing at the University of Mississippi.
Review Quotes:
Eliot Parker's stories simmer with suspense and longing. So many of the characters in these stories are forced to face their losses, all with varying levels of desperation, and you'll be leaning forward to find out what happens next.
-Kimi Cunningham Grant, author of These Silent Woods
See that two-top in the corner? Wonder what that pair is discussing with heads so close together? Eliot Parker's Table for Two lets us slip inside private worlds, eavesdrop on intimate stories of mystery, desperate brides, broken relationships--and ones that outlast death. These people face pain and betrayal and loss, but sometimes, as one character says, "There is still kindness in this world."
-Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater
It's so rare that a work of fiction makes a reader's palms sweat, but the stories in Eliot Parker's Table for Two pull the tripwires in our minds. Parker's stories are linked by the sense that all of these characters have inserted themselves-and others-into the worst human positions available: to follow each of these exquisite narratives is to land solidly on the best unease there is. When a man's dementia causes him to make a run for it, his daughter discovers a part of his past she'd never quite touched. A woman aiming to hold the perfect wedding escapes her rock only to land in a very hard place. Two men cruise down a river, navigating guilt and memory, looking for the sons who have themselves disappeared on a fishing trip. These stories both delight and displace. To sit at a Table for Two is to sit in the company of a masterful new voice in fiction. Parker's collection is not to be missed.
-Jacinda Townsend, Ernest J. Gaines award-winning author of Mother Country
In Eliot Parker's engrossing Table for Two, human connection anchors the core. Through a collection of modern short stories, Parker deftly explores the nature of relationships: temporal and abiding.
-Robert Gwaltney, Georgia Author of the Year, award winning author of The Cicada Tree