ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tina May Hall is assistant professor of English at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Her stories have appeared in 3rd Bed, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, minnesota review, descant, the Collagist, and Water-Stone Review, among others. She is the author of the chapbook All the Day’s Sad Stories.

REVIEWS

“This enigmatic collection comprises curious musings on the convergence of the natural and human worlds. [Delivers] atmospheric and dreamlike stories sure to fascinate.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Hall’s pungent writing breaks down walls between poetry and prose, narrator and reader, humor and horror. These stories, a daunting cross between Rikki Ducornet and early Jayne Anne Phillips, reveal the author’s fascination with life and death, the confusion of hunger with other needs, and the bureaucratic tyranny of forms: sonnets and novellas, chapters and verses.”
—Los Angeles Times

“It looks like prose to the eye, but it’s memorable for the beauty and rhythm of the language, and it longs to be read aloud. . . Some stories in the collection have a traditional structure, but their magic is still in the poetry.“

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Visitations

Erratum: Insert “R” in “Transgressors”

Skinny Girls’ Constitution and Bylaws

Kick

For Dear Pearl, Who Drowned

Faith Is Three Parts Formaldehyde, One Part Ethyl Alcohol

Last Night of the County Fair

A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Long-Gone Love

By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her

Gravetending

In Your Endeavors, You May Feel My Ghostly Presence

The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Meteorologist and Stopped the Rain

This Is a Love Story, Too

How to Remember a Bird

There Is a Factory in Sierra Vista Where Jesus Is Resurrected Every Hour in Hot Plastic and the Stench of Chicken

All the Day’s Sad Stories: A Novella

Acknowledgments

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.