Tereze Gluck - May You Live in Interesting Times (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

Obsession, adultery, infidelity, unrequited love, suicide, betrayal, deathTereze Gl?cks clear-sighted characters coolly assess their actions and reactions. When a mans 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 cats nine lives overshadow a womans subterranean life. Gl?cks 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; Gl?cks 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 ones heart and what one reveals to the world converge. Each story is a resonant act of self-discovery for both writer and reader.