Author(s): Katy Carl

New Releases | Literature

Fragile Objects: A debut short story collection by Katy Carl

In these stories, characters’ bodies trouble their souls, stirring questions about why we are here and how we are to live. Confronted by their own vulnerabilities, they must also contend with the weaknesses of those they want to love. Will they find their trust well placed; will they rise to moments of grace—or will their lives crack under pressure? Set largely in the American South, from the heart of D.C. to the waters of the Gulf Coast, these stories probe the nature of human fragility and imperfection. Children see behind their parents’ masks and learn to ask whether the centre can hold. Priests discover obscene depravities and strive to drive them out. In the presence of the unpredictable, assured friendships splinter. Loving parents push their children to excel, at costs beyond the measured future. And a quixotic idealist transplants his wife and small children to an isolated farm where, beneath the tangled boughs of a pear orchard, they test the limits of their minds’ endurance. These stories seek to do justice in art to the human condition’s real, though fleeting, gifts—to our much-explored, but only ever partially understood, potential for comic resolution, for tragic failure, and the substance of things hoped for between the two.