Heavier Than Air: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction). This item is unavailable.Heavier Than Air: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)

The stories in this first collection deliver the reader into a world in which men, women, and children are on the cusp of some deeper consciousness. The writing gives lie to orderly images of Midwesterners and instead evokes with unnerving clarity an interior landscape that is primitive and quietly chaotic. This is life in the balance - ""whole worlds at the moment of rupture."" The children and adolescent characters search for a moral compass or center, while the adults tangle with their own desires. And yet, in these unprotected places, people thrive in unexpected ways.

NONA CASPERS migrated to San Francisco from rural Minnesota and is an assistant professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She has received an Iowa Fiction Award, a Cooper Award from the Ontario Review, a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant and Award, and a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Grant and Award. Heavier Than Air is her first collection of short fiction.