sewn paper
FICTION / Short Stories
  (single author)
September 2006
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-279-5
EAN 978-0-88984-279-3
$22.95

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Zero Gravity

In this remarkable new anthology of stories, mostly set in Vancouver, Sharon English provokes, shocks, amuses, and finally satisfies the reader with her insights and her character studies. In lucid detail, she captures the lives of a series of slightly skewed protagonists. Using a blend of descriptive detail, convincing dialogue, and social comment, she creates scenes and characters that linger in the mind long after one has finished each story. Corporate inanity, coastal weather, personal foibles and neuroses -- all are evoked with wit and verbal dexterity.

The characters are the more fascinating because they are so ordinary, so recognizable, yet the reader becomes involved with each to such an extent that one regrets that the story must end. A young woman, gradually detaching from reality in her Toronto corporate position, flees to Vancouver where the dream state persists. Another successful executive can no longer see himself. A lightly dressed tourist survives a mountain night by immersing himself in a hot spring. A sixty-eight year old woman encounters, on a nude beach, the woman who stole her sweetheart forty years earlier. From these seemingly innocuous plot lines emerge stories that are fascinating and thought provoking and often very funny.

`English has a strong sensibility and while she can see the faults of her characters, she is always sympathetic to them. People make mistakes, but no one in this universe is evil. The stories are suffused with a gentleness about human failings and an understanding of human need. Frailty, desire and need are perceived as part of the human package, and English's attitude to humanity is acceptance punctuated with acerbity. It's a splendid combination.'
    -- Candace Fertile, Globe and Mail

`What is remarkable about most of these stories is that, though they at first seem disaffected, detached, and apathetically ``cool,'' they are, at their best, ultimately hopeful. People change, they find friends, they face humiliation, and they move on. It isn't particularly hip to admit that you need a friend, or that you're not doing what you want with your life, but these characters do it anyway, and when they do, it's refreshing.'
    -- Sarah Steinberg, Quill & Quire

`Written by Vancouver resident Sharon English, Zero Gravity is an anthology of stories, mostly set in Vancouver, that offer intimate character portraits of individuals who are, either creatively or destructively, coping with the ``zero gravity'' state of being out of synch with life, or the sudden shock and fallout from accidents of fate. From a tourist in unseasonable clothing who survives a chilly mountain night by immersing herself in a hot spring, to a sixty-eight year old woman on a nude beach who meets the woman who stole her sweetheart forty years earlier, to a successful executive who can no longer see himself, and more, the stories weave personal foibles, slippery humor, and memorable moments. A delectable reading experience, to be savored one story at a time or all at once.'
    -- James Cox, Midwest Book Review

`Although there is no title story in English's collection, her message seems clear. The zero gravity of contemporary connections has left an emotional vacuum that cries out to be filled. English's minimalist, well-crafted stories address this need with a good measure of sympathy for distraught characters caught in nets not only of their own making, but of woeful circumstance as well. Irony and moral ambiguity lace these insightful stories as people in transition, usually the young, cope with unresolved lives.'
    -- Nancy Schiefer, London Free Press

 

Sharon English has published one previous book of stories, Uncomfortably Numb.