Paperback / softback
November 1, 2018
9781421426693
English
240
70549
8.50 Inches (US)
5.50 Inches (US)
0.70 Inches (US)
.65 Pounds (US)
$22.00 USD, £18.50 GBP
v2.1 Reference
Electronic book text
November 1, 2018
9781421426709
9781421426693
English
240
70549
8.50 Inches (US)
5.50 Inches (US)
$22.00 USD, £18.50 GBP
v2.1 Reference

Catch, Release

The latest electrifying collection from acclaimed novelist and short story writer Adrianne Harun.

Grand Price Winner, 2019 Eric Hoffer Book Award

It’s all about loss. Don’t kid yourself. Even a simple game of catch is hinged on the moment the ball leaves the glove, the moment it returns. Don’t even try to think this story or any other story is about something else.

In Catch, Release, Adrianne Harun’s second story collection, loss is the driver. But it’s less the usual somber shadow-figure of grieving than an erratically interesting cousin, unmoored, even exhilarated, by the sudden flight into emptiness, the freedom of being neither here nor there. In this suspended state, anything might happen—and it does. Harun’s most realistic stories are suffused with mystery, while her more fantastic tales reveal startling truths within the commonplace. In diverse settings that include, among other places, a British Columbian island, a haunted Midwestern farmhouse, a London townhome, and a dementia care facility overpopulated with dangerously idle guardian angels, characters reconfigure whole worlds as they navigate states defined by absence.

In "The Farmhouse Wife," a young couple, struggling financially, takes up residence in a near-abandoned farmhouse, only to be joined by an inconvenient roommate, a woman whose own bereft state proves perilously seductive. A kleptomaniac father gets caught in one of his petty thefts in "Pearl Diving," propelling his two sons out of one life into another, perhaps more appropriate, one. In "Madame Ida," a family of little girls steadily invades a woman’s life as she puzzles out the mysteries of a missing sheriff-turned-cult-leader and the absence of her own son. And in the title story, two teenagers face off against the hurtful lies of an ancient con woman who is mining a widow’s grief for her own ends.

Adrianne Harun has been described as an exacting and attentive stylist whose stories are rendered in vivid language. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of her work: "Harun finds beauty in pitch black; she makes poetry out of brutality and grace out of terror. She is an alchemist, turning the worst aspects of life into gold." With Catch, Release, Harun upends the world once more.

About the Author

Adrianne Harun is the author of The King of Limbo and Other Stories and A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop and is a frequent faculty member at the Sewanee School of Letters.

Reviews

"Sure to satisfy discerning readers of emotionally wise, high-quality fiction."

- Joan Curbow - Booklist

"Animated by a fierce sense of longing, Harun's pieces expertly depict how individuals grapple with lost love, death, and uncertain futures. Each story exists within a carefully realized world—lit with detail like brilliant, bizarre snow globes—and, fueled by haunting prose, will remain gleaming in readers' minds. Masterful and varied."

"Each story creates unforgettable impressions and memorable lines in a microcosm illuminated by the beauty and complexity of human emotion. Overall, this collection is as it should be—deft, deliberate, dashing, delicious, and direct."

- Christopher Klim & the Eric Hoffer Book Award - US Review of Books

"Told in poised, often shimmering prose, these tales distress and confound... The larger, tragic landscape Harun sketches is acutely destabilizing, wonderfully inscrutable and, at moments, ravenously absurd."

- Mike Peed - New York Times Book Review

"Reading Harun's haunting and incandescent new story collection, Catch, Release, is also like inhabiting a strange and surprising place, one where the unexpected is sneakily placed inside the seemingly mundane."

- Lee Conell - Chapter 16

"Harun's prose sings like poetry, with lush descriptions and pacing that sweeps the reader along like a pleasant alcoholic buzz."

- Rebecca Cuthbert - American Book Review

"There's nothing too unusual about the short stories in Adrianne Harun's new collection except that they're excellent. Nearly every story is a wonderful achievement, a complete emotional world observed in tight prose and slightly, delightedly misanthropic characterization... Harun's stories are old-school rock and roll done really damn well. We should listen."

- Katharine Coldiron - Kenyon Review

Endorsements

"In this masterful and singular collection, the familiar—always uncanny—is fraught with risks: the risks of parenting, of adolescence, of infancy and senescence; of feeling too much or too little. Adrianne Harun’s vivid evocation of a faltering world reveals a black hole lurking at the heart of everything from the dining room to the family car."

- Rikki Ducornet

"Catch, Release is brilliant. Masterly brilliant. Tour de force brilliantthe crystalline prose, the characters who dive off the page and splash down into the reader's heart, the islands and water and sunlight and sand and trees that are as astonishingly real as last night's dreamscape, the moral complexities and contradictions of human beings in contest with the devil, the pitch-perfect sounds of desperation and joy and terror and triumph and unspeakable loss, the smells of fish and salt and sand and musty old farmhouses. As a whole—and these wonderful stories demand to be read as a whole—Catch, Release will break your heart and then mend it and then break it again. This book will endure."

- Tim O'Brien

"The mastery in these stories lies in their understanding of the spookiness and sneakiness of the human heart. How extraordinary this book is, how full of superb writing, how unpredictable on every page."

- Joan Silber

"Adrianne Harun’s short stories are riveting. Vividly imagined, like fever dreams, haunting and original and elusive. It’s as if each story contains—or generates—a mystery that will linger long in the reader’s mind."

- Joyce Carol Oates

"Adrianne Harun is a flat-out expert in her craft, but what sets her apart is her patient and fearless immersion in the lives of her characters. She never evades, never pulls up short. She is an artist of the highest rank and this is a haunting, devastating collection."

- Chris Bachelder
Johns Hopkins University Press
Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction
From 13 To 17

9781421426693 : catch-release-harun
Paperback / softback
240 Pages
$22.00 USD
9781421426709 : catch-release-harun
Electronic book text
240 Pages
$22.00 USD

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