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The handler -- Call up the waters -- The stonemason's wife -- Barn burning -- Bending the map -- Sea women -- Shovelbums -- Fixed blade -- What the birds knew -- Didi.
List of contents
The Handler | 1
Call Up the Waters | 25
The Stonemason’s Wife | 46
Barn Burning | 52
Bending the Map | 78
Sea Women | 99
Shovelbums | 110
Fixed Blade | 130
What the Birds Knew | 143
Didi | 163
Notes | 189
Acknowledgments | 191
About the author
Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters and the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Story, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Utah State University and an assistant fiction editor at AGNI.
Summary
A magnetic debut collection of stories about the daily lives and labors of girls and women in rural America.
In Call Up the Waters, the natural world is an escape hatch, a refuge, a site of work, and an occasional antagonist. In the title story, a devastating drought leads a mother of two deep into the Colorado Rockies in search of water. In “The Handler,” a woman leaves her boyfriend for the New Hampshire woods and fifty-seven sled dogs. A distress call from a boat in Massachusetts Bay compels a mother, in “Sea Women,” to plumb her daughter’s secrets. A girl torn between truth and expectation shows her courage in a funereal performance in “Barn Burning.” And in “Bending the Map,” a woman turns the tables on her obsessive, would-be lover after a powerful storm ravages her canyon home.
The characters in these ten stories—search-and-rescue workers, dog trainers, naturalists, archaeologists, and dowsers—are each fundamentally shaped by the environment in which they live and work. They seek meaning through labor, connection through jobs. But in that searching they often find themselves far from their destination. Familiar landscapes suddenly feel strange. Unfamiliar spaces offer something like hope. Off the map and off the grid, these characters, and their regrets and devotions, are nevertheless immediately, intimately recognizable.
Sharply observant but steadily elegant, textured with empathy and grit, Call Up the Waters marks the arrival of a remarkable new talent.
Foreword
- Digital galley campaign, with DRCs available for major, fiction, feminist, and regional media; digital galley available for download on Edelweiss
- Media outreach
positioning this as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction, for readers
of Laura van den Berg, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Daisy Johnson - Indies Introduce
campaign, targeting booksellers in the MPIBA region - Advertising with MPIBA
- Newsletter promotion
via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts - Academic outreach to
seed book in MFA classrooms - Reader’s Guide
available for download - Virtual event with To The LightHouse and in-person event in Los Angeles
