ISBN: 1476729964 9781476729961

Category: Fiction / General

Page count: 259

Named one of Amazon’s Best Short Story Collections of 2014<br> One of <i>Atlanta Journal Constitution</i>’s 9 Best Books of 2014<br> Best Short Story Collection of the Year, <i>Tweed's Magazine</i><br> Winner of GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction<br> 2014 LA Times Book Prize Finalist<br> Winner of the Florida Book Awards Silver Medal for Fiction<br> Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction<br> <br>In each of the stories in this remarkable debut, award-winning writer David James Poissant explores the tenuous bonds of family—fathers and sons, husbands and wives—as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love.<br><br>His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Standing at the brink, each must make a choice: Leap, or look away? Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin writes that Poissant forces us “to face the people we are when we’re alone in the dark.”<br> <br> From two friends racing to save the life of an alligator in “Lizard Man” to a girl helping her boy­friend face his greatest fears in “The End of Aaron,” from a man who stalks death on an Atlanta street corner to a brother’s surprise at the surreal, improb­able beauty of a late night encounter with a wolf, Poissant creates worlds that shine with honesty and dark complexity, but also with a profound compas­sion. These are stories hell-bent on hope.<br> <br> Fresh, smart, lively, and wickedly funny, <i>The Heaven of Animals</i> is startlingly original and compul­sively readable. As bestselling author Kevin Wilson puts it, “Poissant is a writer who knows us with such clarity that we wonder how he found his way so easily into our hearts and souls.”