A Place between Stations explores the lives of African American characters against the ever-present backdrop of race, but with the myriad complexities of individual minds and souls in the foreground.

Two college students, bound by an intense but uneasy friendship, take an increasingly dangerous road trip through Florida. A widow faces her doubts about her long-dead husband by reliving an odd series of train rides she took along the Hudson River shoreline in the 1950s. An angry, fatherless girl roams a city at night, searching for an escape from the ambiguities of childhood. George Mattie, loner and reluctant guide, leads a misfit nineteenth-century circus caravan on an ill-fated journey through the northern Connecticut woods. In A Place between Stations, Stephanie Allen enlarges contemporary notions of what African American lives can be. Varied, to the point, and beautifully composed, this collection will appeal to all audiences.

Stephanie Allen is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Maryland in College Park. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. She received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2002, and was a finalist in the 2001 Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Short Fiction. She lives with her husband in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"I see threads and glimmers of almost any good writer I could name, and, of course, originality of vision, of technique, of language . . . and characters I've never before seen or even imagined. Allen's is a career I will follow with both great hope and great expectation."—Reginald McKnight

"Stephanie Allen is a writer who gets down to business, right in the first paragraph, and one who wastes few, if any, words. Her stories are beautifully shaped. Once she gets your attention, she holds it."—Steve Yarbrough