The Expense of a View

Polly Buckingham

Nov 2016 · Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction series Book 15 · University of North Texas Press

About this ebook

The stories in The Expense of a View explore the psyches of characters under extreme duress. In the title story, a woman who has moved across the country in an attempt to leave her past behind dumps an empty suitcase into the Columbia River over and over again. In another story, a woman who wakes up mornings only to discover she's been shooting heroin in a night trance, meets her doppelganger on a rainy Oregon beach.  Most of the characters are displaced and disturbed; they suffer from dissociative disorders, denial, and delusions. The settings—Florida, eastern Washington, Seattle, and the Oregon coast—mirror their lunacies. While refusing to look at what’s right in front of themselves might destroy them, it’s equally likely to be just what they need.

About the author

Polly Buckingham teaches at Eastern Washington University. She is founding editor of StringTown Press and Associate Director of EWU's Willow Springs Books. Author of A Year of Silence (Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award 2014), her poetry and short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Spokane.