Reviews
"Permeated with finely crafted writing, grounded in the solidity of objects and places realized through well-textured description and resonant dialogue, this debut makes a wise, quietly provocative statement about commonplace tragedy and the ironies and fragility of relationships."
—Publishers Weekly
Description
Caught in the muddle of modern life, eyes gazing at the middle distance, the characters in Silent Retreats search, down roads paved by custom and dotted by the absurd, for escape, refuge, or, at least, merciful diversion.
Many of the men in Philip Deaver’s stories, having drifted out of their native Illinois to the far corners, find comfort from empty jobs and blank relationships in healing, often hilarious, seductions. In “Why I Shacked Up With Martha” a distracted DC executive pierces the gray blur of his glass box on Dupont Circle with illicit, painfully superficial notes passed to his beautiful, liberated coworker. In “Marguerite Howe,” a businessman from Texas at a cocktail party in New Haven accosts his hostess, blindly convinced that she is the woman of his college day-dreams at the University of Virginia. And, in Nebraska, a defeated legal aid attorney escapes the cold wind of failure and a…
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Paper List price: Your price: 4/15/2008 |
Philip F. Deaver has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf. His short fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1988 and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories 1995 and The Pushcart Prize XX. Deaver teaches in the English Department at Rollins College and is permanent writer in residence there. He is also on the fiction faculty in the Spalding University brief residency MFA program.
