In the Valley of the Kings
Stories
By Terrence Holt
(W. W. Norton & Company, Paperback, 9780393339086, 223pp.)
Publication Date: September 2010
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover
Categories: Short Stories (single author)
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the October 2009 Indie Next List“This collection of haunting, disorienting, but, ultimately, moving stories genuinely blew me away. Each story almost teaches you how to read the next, making this diverse and outstanding collection satisfying on a story-by-story basis, but even more so as a whole. I believe these pieces will be talked about for years.”
-- Robert Sindelar, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
Description
Praised for his "beautifully crafted and strangely surreal" (Peter Matthiessen) stories, Terrence Holt had been operating under the literary radar for more than fifteen years, placing award-winning stories in such noted journals as Zoetrope, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. With the release of this debut collection, Holt's work takes its "rightful place besides those works of genius--fiction, philosophy, theology--unafraid of axing into our iced hearts" (William Giraldi, New York Times Book Review). Whether chronicling a plague that ravages a New England town or the anguish of a son who keeps his father's beating heart in a jar, Holt's stories oscillate between the rational and the surreal, the future and the past, masterfully weaving together reality and myth. Like Poe or Hawthorne, "Holt is a gifted wordsmith, his sentences carefully shaped and often beautiful, and he spins these ancient, irresolvable dilemmas in an elegiac poetry" (Los Angeles Times).
Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009
The history of literature is filled with authors who also performed surgery or scribbled prescriptions. Lynn Neary speaks with two doctors who are also fiction writers — Abraham Verghese and Terrence Holt — about the link between medicine and writing literature. More at NPR.org
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