Shipwrecks and other Stories

By Jerry D. Mathes

In Shipwrecks and Other Stories we read of men and women struggling in love and longing, adultery and addiction, between staying in a place and moving on, while trying to rediscover who they are. Readers search the desert for a beloved mule with the grandson of a hard rock miner. We go for a swim with an obese woman who finds courage by breaking into a closed public pool. We are abandoned with an exiled Guatemalan Special Forces Major and his family on the US-Mexico border when he discovers smugglers trafficking kidnapped girls and faces the decision to attempt to rescue the girls or ignore them and not risk his family's safety. We stand in a rainy night with a commercial fisherman, still reeling from an accident at sea, as he finds hope in the skeleton of a ship that will never float. A hunter tracks the mountains for a wounded elk as he comes to terms with economic changes and having to leave the place he grew up. Two women confront each other about the affairs they had with each other's husbands. In the Meadow Award winning novella, "Still Life," a paramedic spirals into the Las Vegas drug underworld after accidentally killing a girl, but still struggles to do something good. These and other characters haunt the fringes of their own lives shipwrecked in society as they seek identity, hoping to rescue themselves.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1622881338
• ISBN13: 9781622881338
• Release Date: January 2017
• Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Grade 11 to Postsecondary