Catch, Release

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Catch, Release is brilliant. Masterly brilliant. Tour de force brilliant—the 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."