by Carol Reese Samson
ISBN: 978-1-952085-05-5
Publication Date: March 15, 2021
Price: $18.95
Pages: 146
This collection of short stories is about finding a third space, a place of mind that offers time for thought and translation. The narrators in these stories consider “thing theory” and memory and artifacts, especially photographs, observing the way objects and words become metaphors for something else. The narrators listen as things and events “sound” themselves and restructure meanings. This is a collection that searches for correspondences and contemplates absence and explores Virginia Woolf’s idea that nothing is only one thing.
Goose Summer : Stories by Carol Samson
Entering Goose Summer is like entering a dollhouse world of miraculous detail and intricacy, every detail carved with a precision tool. Yet Carol Samson’s stories are not small—these are maximal, a table overflowing with strangeness and beauty: bounty upon bounty.
─Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
In one story in this masterful collection, brothers hang glass doorknobs from the belly of a castrated bull where his testicles used to be. You know nothing about the brothers’ mail-order brides; you know everything. These stories operate somewhere between myth and lore, and that somewhere is where you want to be. I have waited decades to read a writer as original as Carol Samson.
─Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow, She
Carol Samson's stories breathe. They remind us that nothing is static, no matter how still or minutely examined. With prose that has the weight of stone and the transparency of gossamer, Samson creates a space where reader, narrator, and writer share a single eye. Goose Summer is a book of peculiar knowing, a beautiful oddment from the world beyond the world.
─Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan