The Still but Falling World: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

By Simon Van Booy

The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062002037

Simon Van Booy

Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

Book preview

The Still but Falling World

A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

Simon Van Booy

To Maddie

Contents

Begin Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE STILL BUT FALLING WORLD

I live in Rome where people sit by fountains and kiss. The sound of water is the sound of love rushing between them.

In the morning, the marketplace outside my apartment smells like artichokes. They grow on thick stalks. People forget they are flowers. Some leaves are the color of a blushing cheek. The hard leaves protect a heart.

Tomatoes are more delicate. The vines are laid in rows. Each vine bursts open in several places with a red fist.

The man who sells garlic comes from the south and doesn’t sip coffee with the others at dawn. I watch him from my window. I, too, am from the south and know the loneliness of mornings.

Last week it was my cousin’s son’s birthday, and I sent a gift. I’ve been thinking a lot about my cousin lately. I’m starting to understand why she lied to us. She and her husband live with their children in the village where I grew up. It is called Morano Calabro, and the small stone houses wrap around the mountain like a cloak of many pockets. At the top of the village are the ruins of a