House Fires

by Nancy Reisman and Alex Brown

Book Overview

These eleven stories travel from snowbound Buffalo in the 1940s to Boston, Providence and San Francisco in 1999, and across the domestic terrain of desire's unruly claims to the nuances of grief.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877456925
• ISBN13: 9780877456926
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Stories

This is a great collection of stories by Nancy Resiman. I first heard of her in the Best American Short Stories where she had a story published. I really liked it, so I decided to check out more of her works. All of the stories are beautifully written, if a little depressing. I especially liked the series of Jessie stories that she included. This book won the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1999, which is really prestigious (though I didn't know it before.. I mean, c'mon.. IOWA?? What are you going to write about?! Cows? But yeah, it's a really great award!).

Beautiful, heartbreaking, and funny too

Nancy Reisman's stories are carefully considered, painstakingly crafted works, beautiful at times in the way collages are beautiful, montaged and layered and suggestive. They are ghostly sometimes, and elusive, changing depending on how the light hits them. And sometimes they are funny -- the dinner scene where the young woman is announcing that she's gay and the whole thing gets misheard by the deaf grandparent -- hysterical! And with dialogue that's so right on, so real. Nancy Reisman takes her time with her characters, she's patient with her language and with building her worlds, and I hope readers take the time to invest in these quiet, modest gems. They're so worth it.