Synopses & Reviews
An anonymous cast spans four generations in the struggle for redemption, love, and peace. An immigrant cobbler sees his son wrongly arrested by a man who shines his shoes. The memory of a boy’s deceased mother is betrayed when his friend use her makeup as gag. A waitress secretly admires a man who atones for his troubled past by refurbishing a house. And a man laments his lost love by tracing her footsteps across the floors of his empty apartment. A storm looms, bringing the stories together across time and place, uniting them all by their common humanity. These intense portraits are packed with intelligent Christian allegory and lyricism that work together to culminate in one bright mosaic picture.
Review
“Like miniature boxes inventively and carefully wrapped, Tina May Hall’s stories open to reveal the prize inside: worlds spun from caught moments, little mysteries, and shimmery incantations. Nimbly charting a terrain between fiction and poetry, reality and another realm, this is a book of insights both delicate and keen from a singular new voice.”
—Anne Sanow, author of Triple Time, winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Review
“This is a remarkable collection. I am struck in particular by the range of imagination and by the prose. It is new, overwhelmed and overwhelming, and very strong. The power, insistence, occasional humor, and frequent beauty of the author’s voice carries the reader as surely as conventional fiction used to.”
—Renata Adler
Review
“Tina May Hall is, at heart, a lyric poet of mood and image who realizes that each sentence is an acoustical event. Take this book into a quiet place, because even the spaces between words make the most exquisite of sounds.”
—Peter Markus
Review
“This enigmatic collection comprises curious musings on the convergence of the natural and human worlds. [Delivers] atmospheric and dreamlike stories sure to fascinate.”
—Publishers Weekly
Review
“Hall’s pungent writing breaks down walls between poetry and prose, narrator and reader, humor and horror. These stories, a daunting cross between Rikki Ducornet and early Jayne Anne Phillips, reveal the author’s fascination with life and death, the confusion of hunger with other needs, and the bureaucratic tyranny of forms: sonnets and novellas, chapters and verses.”
—Los Angeles Times
Review
“It looks like prose to the eye, but it’s memorable for the beauty and rhythm of the language, and it longs to be read aloud. . . Some stories in the collection have a traditional structure, but their magic is still in the poetry.“
Review
“[Hall] marries plot to the beauty of her prose--but her priorities are lyricism first, narrative second. She’s concerned with relationships, the hidden lives of objects, and the death of beauty. She’s concerned with those tiny, everyday moments that reverberate throughout our lives, a beacon of otherworldliness in an ordinary world.”
—The Rumpus
Review
“One of the most breathtaking books you will read this year. The stories are dense and elegant and oftentimes strange but always engaging.Hall is a master sentence crafter. She put words together in really complex, beautiful ways.”. . . As I read each story I was left with a profound sense of awe for the intelligence and grace with which this collection was written.”
—HTMLGIANT Reviews
Review
“Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. ‘The Physics of Imaginary Objects’ is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you’ll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall’s poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall’s hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious.”
—Newpages.com
Synopsis
Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize
The Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.
Synopsis
Four separate generations of nameless characters struggle for redemption, love, and peace in a lyrically weaved collection of stories.
About the Author
“This enigmatic collection comprises curious musings on the convergence of the natural and human worlds. [Delivers] atmospheric and dreamlike stories sure to fascinate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hall’s pungent writing breaks down walls between poetry and prose, narrator and reader, humor and horror. These stories, a daunting cross between Rikki Ducornet and early Jayne Anne Phillips, reveal the author’s fascination with life and death, the confusion of hunger with other needs, and the bureaucratic tyranny of forms: sonnets and novellas, chapters and verses.”
—Los Angeles Times
“It looks like prose to the eye, but it’s memorable for the beauty and rhythm of the language, and it longs to be read aloud. . . Some stories in the collection have a traditional structure, but their magic is still in the poetry.“
“[Hall] marries plot to the beauty of her prose--but her priorities are lyricism first, narrative second. She’s concerned with relationships, the hidden lives of objects, and the death of beauty. She’s concerned with those tiny, everyday moments that reverberate throughout our lives, a beacon of otherworldliness in an ordinary world.”
—The Rumpus
“One of the most breathtaking books you will read this year. The stories are dense and elegant and oftentimes strange but always engaging.Hall is a master sentence crafter. She put words together in really complex, beautiful ways.”. . . As I read each story I was left with a profound sense of awe for the intelligence and grace with which this collection was written.”
—HTMLGIANT Reviews
“Occasionally you stumble across a piece of literary fiction so eloquent in its style, honest in its material, and direct in its approach that it resonates with you days, weeks, years after you read it. ‘The Physics of Imaginary Objects’ is one of these intelligent, enlightening, and brazen books that you’ll want to place on your shelf at eye-level so you will remember to keep picking it up. Hall’s poetic style and articulate precision give this book a revolutionary quality. It nudges you along with an air of solemn importance and modest wisdom. Expertly composed and awesomely beautiful, Hall’s hybrid of poetry and prose is neither sparse nor excessive, sentimental nor detached, diffident nor ostentatious.”
—Newpages.com
Table of Contents
Elynia Prologue I A Trip to the Graveyard II Footsteps Upstairs III The Church and Military Monuments in the Town IV The Shoe Man V A Picture Found in the Salvation Army VI Man Looks too Long into a Window VII Building Ourselves Devotion VIII Reaching Out to Touch the Old Ramparts IX Consuming Romance (The Hypnotist) X The Already-Criminal XI Time Spent as a Picture upon a Shelf XII An Afternoon Game XIII A Man Buys a House XIV The Waitress and the Secret Box XV A Tendency of Staring at the Storm Drain
Epilogue Other Stories I Rope II Train Platform III The Artist is Human IV Aria Night V Cistern VI The Harbormaster