These Hands

Kevin Brockmeier

Jan 2001 · Penguin Random House Audio · Kimesimuliwa na Andre Sogliuzzo

Kuhusu kitabu hiki cha kusikiliza

"Caroline is watchful and sincere, shy yet earnest. She seldom speaks, and when she does her lips scarcely part, so that sometimes Lewis must listen closely to distinguish her voice from the cycling of her breath. Her eyes are a miracle - a startled blue with frail green spikes bound by a ring of black - and he is certain that if he could draw his reflection from them, he would discover there a face neither foreign nor lost. Caroline sleeps face down, her knees curled to her chest: she sleeps often and with no sheets or blankets. Her hair is brown, her skin pale. Her smile is vibrant but brief, like a bubble that lasts only as long as the air is still. She is eighteen months old."

Kevin Brockmeier draws the listener in with poetic prose that paints a picture of beauty and purity, and becomes a part of a love story that tests the boundaries of morality without ever quite crossing them. Lewis Winters, a thirty-four year-old writer of fairy tales, recounts his short-lived relationship with Caroline Mitchell, and the anguish of having to let go without getting to say good-bye.

Kuhusu mwandishi

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky, and the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. He has published stories in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), and an NEA grant. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.