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    The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories
    The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories
    The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories
    Ebook216 pages3 hours

    The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories

    By Edward J. Delaney

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In prairie towns and backwaters, and in the big cities, people search for themselves and their lost way. Is the American dream still possible in this big, harsh land?

    The short fiction in The Big Impossible explores guilt and redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady.

    In “Clean,” a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it will play against him. In “House of Sully,” a working-class family navigates the tumultuous year that 1968 was, as new perceptions shake long-held and dependable, if sometimes misguided, beliefs. Other stories examine the inner life of a school shooter, the comical posturing of writers at a literary party, a British veteran of The Great War living at a Florida retirement home but haunted by his losses, and a man’s bittersweet visits to past lives via Google Street View. In the sequence set in the West, an itinerant worker moves across the Great Plains, navigating stark landscapes, trying for foothold.

    The Atlantic’s C. Michael Curtis praised Ted Delaney’s debut collection for its “moral intensity . . . in the tradition of writers as varied as Ethan Canin and William Trevor.” Two decades later Delaney returns to the short fiction form with utter mastery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurtle Point Press
    Release dateSep 10, 2019
    ISBN9781885983756
    The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories
    Author

    Edward J. Delaney

    Edward J. Delaney is an award-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. His books include the novels Follow the Sun, Broken Irish, and Warp & Weft, and the short story collection The Drowning and Other Stories. His short fiction has also been published in the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories, and featured on PRI's Selected Shorts program. Among other honors, he has received the PEN/New England Award, O. Henry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is also the co-author of Born to Play, by Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia. As a journalist, Delaney has written for publications including the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune, received the National Education Reporting Award, and has served as an editor at the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. As a filmmaker, he has directed and produced documentary films including The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life of Andre Dubus and Library of the Early Mind. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Delaney has also spent time in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado, and now lives in Rhode Island, where he teaches at Roger Williams University and edits the literary journal Mount Hope.

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    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This was a good selection of short stories. I liked Part 2 The House of Sully the best. Over all not a bad read.

    Book preview

    The Big Impossible - Edward J. Delaney

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