National Network for Equitable Library Service

Pam Durban's new collection of stories explores the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters — science, religion, family, self — the powerful act of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all. The title story in Soon — chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology — follows two generations of a family whose lives are driven by the "patient and brutal need that people called hope, which... formed from your present life a future where you would be healed or loved." In "The Jap Room," winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her husband, a World War II veteran, finally come home. "Rowing to Darien" introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband's rice plantation. In "Hush" a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky's iconic Mammoth Cave. An adopted child waits for his mother to come back for him in "Birth Mother," and, in "Forward, Elsewhere, Out," a mother must come to terms with her adolescent son's sexuality. The stories in this collection deftly broach universal themes of love, loss and the redemptive power of storytelling. The collection includes a foreword from novelist and short story writer Mary Hood, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize, Townsend Prize and Lillian Smith Award.