Love Begins in Winter

Five Stories

By Simon Van Booy
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061661471, 256pp.)

Publication Date: April 23, 2009

Categories: Short Stories (single author)

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the July 2009 Indie Next List

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, now translated into several languages. He lives in New York City, where he teaches part-time at the School of Visual Arts and at Long Island University. He is also involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) for young adults living in underserved communities.

"The stories of Love Begins in Winter are stylistically brilliant and emotionally beautiful. I found myself gasping, literally gasping, at surprises so perfectly attuned as to be inevitable. Simon Van Booy is an extraordinary writer, and this is a book to be read and reread again and again."
-Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

"Love Begins in Winter" brings to life the wistfulness of youth and the possibilities of young love with clear and graceful prose."
-Jamie Saul, author of Light of Day

"Simon Van Booy seems to start with a story in mind and then to turn it into a poem without losing its narrative power. Love Begins in Winter is an exquisite show of force."
-Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising and Beet

"Simon Van Booy knows a great deal about the complex longings of the human heart, and he articulates those truths in his stories with pitch-perfect elegance. Love Begins in Winter is a splendid collection, and Van Booy is now a writer on my must-always-read list."
-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Severance

"Beautiful...each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness."
-Publishers Weekly

"Pitch-perfect.. Convincingly shows how love rights the world."
-Kirkus Reviews