University of Iowa Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-1-60938-876-8 | Paper: 978-1-60938-875-1 Library of Congress Classification PS3615.B83 Dewey Decimal Classification 813.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | AWARDS | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas—a place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems—worried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions—they also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.
What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that’s somehow gotten by all these years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Janice Obuchowski’s fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse,Alaska Quarterly Review, Story, Conjunctions online, and LitHub. Previously a fiction editor at New England Review, she lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
REVIEWS
“Each story in The Woods, carefully paced and keenly observed, takes a close and compassionate look at the supposedly bucolic lifestyles of those living in a quaint town and unearths the emotional fault lines that undergird ordinary life… With hints of dark fairy tales and grim truths that are unable to be faced, these stories marry unsettled imaginings to those that are heart-wrenchingly real.”
— Shelf Awareness
"Juxtaposing folkloric history against a contemporary college town, The Woods taps into the strange dichotomy of the bookish and the bucolic, as well as what used to be versus what is now. . . . offer[ing] not so much sylvan ghost stories as an unsettling disquiet, à la Shirley Jackson, exploring the interiority of loneliness, hope, imposter syndrome, jealousy, rage, grief, and COVID-driven panic. . . . The setting is uniquely Vermont—old churches, old taverns, rustic mountains, and cabins—yet the situations are ubiquitously accessible. The woods is a synecdoche of a far-reaching world of we well acquainted with the grueling work-life of higher education, creators struggling to reconcile their artistic identities with a lack of production, families struggling at the fray, communities still smarting from the confines of 2020. Obuchowski’s The Woods offers both us and characters the landscape to negotiate past and present, surviving and thriving, an invitation to an expanse larger than ourselves."
— Heavy Feather Review
“Eloquent, erudite, inherently engaging, thought-provoking and fun, The Woods is an impressive collection of eleven original short stories by a master of this difficult literary format.”
— Midwest Book Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
The Cat
The Orams
The Chair
The Bear Is Back
Mountain Shade
The Forest Tavern
Sylvia Who Dreams of Dactyls
Potions
Monsters
Self-Preservation
Millstone Hill
AWARDS
John Simmons Short Fiction Award, 2022.
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