Abundant Light: Short Fiction
by Valerie Miner
Abundant Light, Valerie Miner's fourth collection of short fiction, reveals a master storyteller writing in her prime. This collection looks closely at definitions of family and asks how this fragile and frightening entity can shape us, nurture us, or even destroy us. These stories also explore friendship as it is enriched by differences in nationality, race, class, and gender. Whether set in Calcutta, Cornwall, Alberta, Edinburgh, or the Coastal Range of California, each story is imbued with a resonant spirit of place. Light is a presence and metaphor in each of these stories, physical light as well as light ranging through human insight and reflection, as characters face the possibilities of forgiveness, acceptance and reunion.
Paperback
English
Brand New
Publisher Description
Abundant Light, Valerie Miner's fourth collection of short fiction, reveals a master storyteller writing in her prime. This collection looks closely at definitions of family and asks how this fragile and frightening entity can shape us, nurture us, or even destroy us. These stories also explore friendship as it is enriched by differences in nationality, race, class, and gender. Whether set in Calcutta, Cornwall, Alberta, Edinburgh, or the Coastal Range of California, each story is imbued with a resonant spirit of place. Light is a presence and metaphor in each of these stories, physical light as well as light ranging through human insight and reflection, as characters face the possibilities of forgiveness, acceptance and reunion.
Author Biography
Valerie Miner is an award-winning author of twelve books. Her novels include Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters: A Novel, All Good Women, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction work includes Trespassing and Other Stories, The Night Singers, and Movement: A Novel in Stories, and a collection of essays Rumors from the Cauldron. Her book The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a finalist for the PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award in 2002. Valerie Miner is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.
Review
"Valerie Miner's singular gift as a writer is her Chekhovian equanimity, her ability to show the humanity of diverse characters as unique individuals, simply revealing their humanity and all the mistakes they make at others' expenses without judgment, allowing for an almost cinematic distance on the one hand while on the other allowing us inside her character's skin in revealing moments of toughness and tenderness, in spite of their irresponsibility to others, their selfishness, their rage. I marvel at Valerie Miner's ability to show the masks and voices of characters perhaps very much unlike herself and still to find a way to accept and forgive them all, a kind of narrative love as deep as the love the families in these stories share."
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