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"The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon's The Gunman and the Carnival -- loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California -- center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure"--
List of contents
Conents
Eudora Loved Her Life 3
A Vampire Story 15
Dangerous 25
In Absence 27
Agency 35
Claudine 39
Cloudy with a Chance of Rain 51
Pandemic Dreams 53
Cul-de-Sac 59
Pack Rat, All Will Be Well 67
Nathanael West Died Unknown 89
Stardust 95
Invisible Woman Dancing in a Cage 105
Cat Sitting for a Ghost 117
In the future perhaps he will have another chance 129
Buffalo 137
Endnotes 141
Acknowledgments 143
About the author
Catherine Gammon is author of the novels
Isabel Out of the Rain, Sorrow, China Blue, and
The Martyrs, The Lovers, and of the early story collection
Beauty and the Beast. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, as well as attending the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi.
After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, and later, in Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts before moving to New York, where she worked for
The New York Review of Books. She left New York to join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1992 and later returned to California for training and ordination at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm. She lives again in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.
Summary
Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace. The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival — loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California — center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure.
Foreword
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