Death Cleaning and Other Units. This item is unavailable.Death Cleaning and Other Units

"Nancy Burke's stories open the treacherous ground of marriage and family relations with fearless intimacy." --Marina Antropow Cramer

You will laugh, weep and roll your eyes at these unreliable characters, among them a man in love with the voice of his GPS, a teenage couple hiding flaws as they discover love, and a young wife inspired by a dead seagull to do what she needs to do. These stories deal with the vulnerability of well-intentioned people and the ephemeral 'units of measure' that are part of how we see the world. The personal touches on the universal with Burke's seemingly ordinary characters; they have much to show us about our own foibles and about how we live every day in that space between the ideal and the real.

Nancy Burke studied writing at the Rutgers' Newark MFA Creative Writing Program and teaches writing at Montclair State University and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her earlier work includes: From the Abuelas' Window (2005), If I Could Paint the Moon Black (2014) and Only the Women are Burning (2020). Her short fiction has appeared in Pilgrim: A Journal of Catholic Experience and Meat for Tea: The Valley Review. Her story, At the Pool, (included in this collection) was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction at Dappled Things Magazine. She lives in Little Falls, NJ.