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Finely crafted stories from one of the South's most eloquent new voices

The seven stories in Pam Durban's widely praised debut collection are tales of family, of love and loss, of survival and affirmation. Durban's resonant prose subtly obliges her readers to experience the rush of icy water in a stream, the taste of greens freshly snatched from an overgrown garden, the dread weight of confusion and uncertainty.

In "This Heat," the opening story, a mill worker faces the long-expected loss of her teenage son when his weak heart finally gives out. In the title story, which concludes the collection, a formidably eccentric woman abruptly leaves her daughter and granddaughter to answer a "calling" to do missionary work in Africa.

Framed between these two stories is a gathering of characters made real and consequential by Durban's touch: a country singer more than a few big breaks short of stardom, a preadolescent boy lovestruck over his private swimming instructor, a father cut off from his children by haunting war memories, and others.

Pam Durban is the author of The Laughing Place, which won the 1994 Townsend Prize for Fiction. In addition, Durban is the recipient of the 1988 Whiting Writer's Award and the 1984 Rinehart Award in Fiction. Her stories, which have appeared in such publications as Tri-Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and The Georgia Review, have been widely anthologized. She teaches at Georgia State University.

ISBN 0820317756 paper • $18.95

"Throughout this collection the reader is privy to an uncanny visual intelligence . . . made hauntingly resonant by the careful examination of the emotional context."
—Robb Forman Dew, New York Times Book Review