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SEARCH PARTY

Valerie Trueblood

Stories of Rescue

In these thirteen stories linked by a common transcendent human genius, the writing is confident and clear and original, and often drop-dead stunning, as if the stories are being told by the most casually eloquent among us.

In the epigraph to this volume, Penelope Fitzgerald tells us: “If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching,” and so we discover each story here to follow the arc of a search, just as each also contains a rescue. What is immediately apparent is that it will be impossible to guess the form this rescue will take or even who it is who’ll require it. Instead, the astonishingly talented Valerie Trueblood has imbued each story with its own depth and mystery, so rescue comes as a surprise to the reader, who is in intimate sympathy for the soul in extremity. And these are diverse characters whose fates, in lesser hands, might be thought of as hopeless: the fired cop turned security guard, the stolid, 19-year-old nurses’ aide who will not be going to art school, the cynical radio producer who is dying of breast cancer and on a plane on her way to Lourdes. Valerie Trueblood’s short story collection, Marry or Burn (Counterpoint, 2010), was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Washington State Award. The collection was widely praised: Elle Magazine called the book “outstanding … Valerie Trueblood uses the threads of familiar topics—love, marriage, separation, general angst—to spin affecting, utterly unexpected yarns.” Writing in The Boston Globe, Nan Goldberg praised her “unique and beautiful” language, writing that Trueblood “presents the panoramic and the particular entwined in an impossibly small package. Her complex characters effervesce; they tumble and spill off the page.” Her first novel, Seven Loves, was published by Little, Brown in 2006 and won praise from Elizabeth Strout who called it "Utterly exquisite! An achingly beautiful portrayal of a woman's life and loves and losses. I loved every word of this book,” and Ann Patchett, who wrote “Intelligent and beautifully written, Seven Loves is as intricate and perfectly constructed as the movement of a fine Swiss watch. I loved every page” among others (for more reviews, kindly refer to www.valerietrueblood.com). She has been a Contributing Editor of The American Poetry Review for many years and is Co-Trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Estate. She lives in Seattle.

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Book Published 2013-07-16 by Counterpoint

Comments

The best short story writers are able to master the format the way chefs can make a memorable, textured dish out of two or three ingredients. Trueblood is a master of this kind. Her prose is at once sparse and poetic... It's not just that her latest collection, Search Party, features a number of characters in transition themselves (a mother with cancer on her way to Lourdes, a sister attending her sister's memorial service, a former cop working as a security guard in a school … ) It's that her stories are so engrossing, so beautifully written, so complete without being long, that you can pick one up, briefly lose yourself in it and then get back to packing up the summer house, or dealing with the school supply list. Read more...

The diamond-sharp stories in Trueblood's second collection dazzle…Trueblood (Marry or Burn) tells these stories from unusual angles, with precision and a depth of insight and empathy that enfold the reader into the characters' lives.

The diamond-sharp stories in Trueblood’s second collection dazzle. In “Think Not Bitterly of Me,” Abby watches the present-day docudrama of her childhood kidnapping in the 1930s and wonders, “If your life was just any old thing, what made you keep at it?” Despite the obstacles thrown in their way by fate (one character is knocked unconscious by her lover; another is stabbed by her mother; another fights cancer), Trueblood’s characters do keep at it, searching not for meaning or answers, but simply for rest. As a young home health aide helping a 39-year-old man with MS puts it, “Your life was there, like your fingerprint, inescapable.” Yet moments of connection and grace constitute the rescue referred to in the subtitle, such as when ex-cop and school security officer Dooley talks a student out of shooting himself, in “Downward Dog”; and when a widower comes to accept his son’s disabled girlfriend Guadalupe, a woman “of whom he had been told and not told,” because her vulnerability matches his own, in “Guatemala.” Trueblood (Marry or Burn) tells these stories from unusual angles, with precision and a depth of insight and empathy that enfold the reader into the characters’ lives.

Contains a few outstanding examples of the art of the short story...She excels at the vignette. "Downward Dog," "The Stabbed Boy" and "Street of Dreams" are no more than four pages each, and yet they insinuate themselves with a minimum of detail--they resonate…Trueblood (Mary or Burn, 2010, etc.) is a writer to follow.