Visit Me in California: Stories (Triquarterly Books) - Softcover

Windsor, Cooley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810124963 ISBN 13: 9780810124967

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Deftly moving between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the profane, this collection of short stories is populated by modern children, ancient poets, dying men, and your basic, mundane Greek gods. Windsor turns familiar stories from the Bible and from myth inside out, exploring the feelings of minor characters and looking at events from imaginative perspectives. His prose is rich with detail and emotion and he touches on themes of art and artifice, success and failure, family and its sacrifices, and expectations met or missed.In ""The Last Israelite in the Red Sea,"" a follower of Moses who dallies during their Exodus finds it more difficult to walk across the bottom of the temporarily displaced Red Sea without shoes. ""Four of the Times My Sister Cried"" follows a young narrator as his family rehearses for his mother's death and then, as they must, lives without her. The wry ""The Art of War"" has characters from Homer to a courtesan talking shop about the battle of Troy from their perspectives. Set as a series of short pieces, ""The Fleshly School of Poetry"" tells of lessons learned and lessons taught. With its explorations of expectations, ""Meet the Author"" gives readers intimate portraits of various plans or coping mechanisms people put up when death draws close.""The End of the World"" approaches the Rapture with a humorously practical spin: wouldn't the angels need a plan to ensure that it goes smoothly? ""In Parting"" explores some of the troubles with family, especially when a sister's child turns out to be a marionette. The geographically explicit ""Three Mediums in San Francisco"" touches on frustrated and imagined eroticism. The collection ends with ""The Hilton Epiphany,"" a fitting closer in which divinity comes to an unlikely person in an unlikely place.

About this title

Review

"The breadth of Windsor's imagination paired with his skill for wit and wordplay brings to mind writers such as Amy Hempel and Aimee Bender. These stories give new and devastating insight into what it means to yearn and what it means to falter; they commit the rare and essential accomplishment of exposing their characters as wounded, flawed, and wholly human." --Heather Dewar, Booklist, starred review

"Windsor's stories possess the startling, memorable quality of the brightest fiction."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Cooley Windsor's work has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Blink. He is affiliated with the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and is an adjunct in the graduate writing program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0810124963
• ISBN 13: 9780810124967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 130