May You Live in Interesting Times
Winner of the 1995 Iowa Short Fiction Award
“Tereze Glück brings us rapturous stories about men and women, prisoners of their own hearts, for whom departure is the natural medium, for whom no ordinary acts are harmless. May You Live in Interesting Times leaves an indelible portrait of an obsessive world in which both death and blue iris are always in bloom.”—Shelby Hearon, author of Life Estates
“In these elusive, subtle short stories Glück tempts the reader with surprises as she moves from the familiar to the exotic…This is one collection of stories to be read slowly in order to savor its understated art.”—Choice
Obsession, adultery, infidelity, unrequited love, suicide, betrayal, death—Tereze Glück's clear-sighted characters coolly assess their actions and reactions. When a man's wife dies suddenly, he feels liberated, and learning this stuns him. Taking a leap into personhood, a child watching her mother in the garden experiences empathy. A woman addicted to a lover realizes how she has squandered herself. A kiss in a taxicab sets two people on the road to inevitability. Scars, even small ones, reflect the power and mystery of the roads people take from one life into another. In the intense title story, suicide, long-distance love, and a cat's nine lives overshadow a woman's subterranean life.
Glück's wry and rueful stories chronicle her characters' struggles to tell the truth regardless of where that might lead them. Insistent, stubbornly spirited voices inform these tales; Glück's characters dig in their heels and announce, for good or ill, “This is who I am.” In the end their moral integrity forces them to come face to face with themselves. At the intersection where these insightful stories take place, what is in one's heart and what one reveals to the world converge. Each story is a resonant act of self-discovery for both writer and reader.
Contents
Sunrise
A Cuban Girl
Yellow Light
The House in the Woods
Gone Fishing
Bill Hilgendorff
The Fabric of Society
Mexico
Oceanic Hotel, Nice
Praise
Essence and Quintessence
On the Plain
Amor Fati
The Man in the Snow
Arson
Ansel’s Mother
The Dance Floor
May You Live in Interesting Times
I Was Expecting a Letter
The Blue Iris
We Never Look Up