Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE HOT CLIMATE OF PROMISES AND GRACE

Steven Nightingale

Short stories deeply indebted to Sufi Tales and Jataka stories, as well as to the Brothers Grimm and American folktales; Steven Nightingale offers testimonies of revelation, mischief, miracles and grace

From widely anthologized poet, novelist, and essayist Steven Nightingale comes 64 delightful pieces combining humor and sensuality with surrealism and an oblique spirituality, and each story offers an opportunity of gentle instruction, invention and entertainment. The book is a spiritual pilgrimage, forming a spectacularly diverse, humorous, and interrelated body of work. These are tales of women rising to power—women of curious knowledge, natural grace, rough sensuality.

Steven Nightingale is the author of Granada: Pomegranate in the Hand of God (Counterpoint 2015), two novels and six books of sonnets, as well as numerous essays. Nightingale’s poetry has been widely anthologized and he has taught poetry in more than 50 schools and universities.

Available products
Book Published 2016-10-01 by Counterpoint
Book Published 2016-10-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

Nightingale’s transcendent collection offers 64 vignettes, with a nod to folktales, which explore the wonder, grace, and humor of life and the many pathswithin and around it…. Inquisitive and surreal, Nightingale’s imaginative tales extend into the recesses of mind and spirit as his characters grapple with life’s moral and metaphysical questions.

Sixty-four mystical fables purportedly told to the author by powerful, entrancing women he’s encountered in a far-ranging life . . . If these insights draw you in, make you think, or give you spiritual goosebumps, this book will be an ice cream store with 64 flavors . . . A light-footed exploration of the mysteries of our existence, with the consistent theme that paradise is here on Earth.

With the concision of a poet and the expansiveness of a true storyteller, Steven Nightingale has fashioned a wonderful collection of gem-like tales, all of them told by, about, or through women around the world and across time. Their voices are resonant, their stories incredibly varied. They bring to mind the interconnected stories of Henri Michaux and the mosaic structure of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ This is a journey of revelations to be read and reread.

The imagination and creativity in Steve Nightingale’s The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace cannot be surpassed. Within each story is a lesson worth learning. The depth of wisdom comes forth and holds you in her hand until you laugh or your jaw drops open in amazement. Using both the glory and the mystery of religion, these stories explore the minds of women and tell you the wonder of a man who loves them.

Charming in the way of Coelho, Nightingale’s work is proof of a life lived with both ears open, one to the lives and stories around him and one to what readers want and need to hear.

A must read for the lovers of fascinating, magical story telling.

Each woman in Steven Nightingale’s THE HOT CLIMATE OF PROMISES AND GRACE is strong, idiosyncratic, certain, and, in most cases, in possession of a kind of work in which she excels. Together they form a chorus. The book becomes a creed, as radical as it is ancient. It offers an assessment of the state of the world. It celebrates the co-creating power of work on oneself. And it is an invitation to see that paradise is in the world and to move toward it.