Synopses & Reviews
The fourteen stories in Masterss third collection are set in New England, upstate New York, and various European locales. They range from a late-blooming romance between two shoeshine booth operators to uninvited mourners crashing the funerals of people they dont know, from a felon-turned-chef watching his son sample his savory meatloaf to a dual tale involving two unlikely murderers.
Review
“Hilary Masters investigates relationships with such delicacy, he’s like the hummingbird of short story writers. I couldn’t put the book down. The story ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ is amazing. Masters’s many admirers have reason to celebrate the publication of this book; new readers will be fascinated.”—Ann Beattie, author of
Park City “This brilliant new collection of stories by Hilary Masters is masterful. Always wise and tender, the stories’ beginnings embrace, their middles bewitch, and their endings trump our expectations. Throughout, a companionable intimacy holds our attention. Here is a book with no boring parts!”—Kelly Cherry, author of We Can Still Be Friends “I liked watching these stories peel away, layer by layer, the secrets and tensions that exist between parent and child, friend and lover, present and past. Masters has a keen sense of how to recapture the nuances of memory, via language or image, and while each story delivers its insights with satisfying force, some of them seem to me alarmingly wise.”—Robley Wilson, author of The World Still Melting “I love these stories because they restore my sense of literary awe, and they do it very quietly. Here is a lot of old, human time compressed into small moments.”—Cynthia Shearer, author of The Celestial Jukebox
"Masters is a fine writer—Henry James with libido. Sophisticated, strong, devilish at times, teasing the reader with a complex situation, then dropping it. Everything that needed to be said has been said."—Rick DeMarinis, author of The Mortician’s Apprentice
Review
"Masters is a fine writer—Henry James with libido. Sophisticated, strong, devilish at times, teasing the reader with a complex situation, then dropping it. Everything that needed to be said has been said."—Rick DeMarinis, author of The Mortician’s Apprentice
About the Author
HilaryMastersis the author of nine novels, two other story collections, a memoir, a collection of personal essays, and a book-length essay on a Mexican mural. He is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Balch Prize for Fiction, and the Monroe Spears Prize (for his essays). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is a professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.