Lost Person Behavior: Stories

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A magnetic debut collection of stories about the daily lives and labors of girls and women in rural America.

In Call Up the Waters, the natural world is an escape hatch, a refuge, a site of work, and an occasional antagonist. In the title story, a devastating drought leads a mother of two deep into the Colorado Rockies in search of water. In The Handler, a woman leaves her boyfriend for the New Hampshire woods and fifty-seven sled dogs. A distress call from a boat in Massachusetts Bay compels a mother, in Sea Women, to plumb her daughters secrets. A girl torn between truth and expectation shows her courage in a funereal performance in Barn Burning. And in Bending the Map, a woman turns the tables on her obsessive, would-be lover after a powerful storm ravages her canyon home.

The characters in these nine storiessearch-and-rescue workers, dog trainers, naturalists, archaeologists, and dowsersare each fundamentally shaped by the environment in which they live and work. They seek meaning through labor, connection through jobs. But in that searching they often find themselves far from their destination. Familiar landscapes suddenly feel strange. Unfamiliar spaces offer something like hope. Off the map and off the grid, these characters, and their regrets and devotions, are nevertheless immediately, intimately recognizable.

Sharply observant but steadily elegant, textured with empathy and grit, Call Up the Waters marks the arrival of a remarkable new talent.

Reviews

Praise forCall Up the Waters

"The achievement of these stories has more to do with emotional movement than a point of arrival. This approach creates a sense of depth and realism: These characters exist beyond the moments the text describes; their world is not restricted to a story arc [. . .] A collection that patiently renders emotional depth without recourse to angst or melodrama."Kirkus Reviews

Call Up the Watersis a stunning collection by an extraordinary talent. With great precision, Amber Caron manages to locate the most fragile and painful parts of her characters relationships while also pulling in a vivid sense of the external world and all that is beyond the open window or door. These stories are suspenseful, moving, and beautifully written.Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life

Amber Carons debut signals the arrival of a bright talent to literary short fiction. Her prose sings, and shapes satisfying stories that reveal deeply human truths about labor, gender, and our ineffable connection to the natural world.Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of How Strange a Season

Amber Caron creates a sobering and nuanced sense of emotional wildernessa world in which no place is ever entirely sure or safe. This book is cool, assured, unsettling, and gorgeous.Joan Wickersham, author ofThe Suicide IndexandThe News from Spain

Amber Caron writes with flinty tenderness about the ways that human yearnings can collide with impervious physical and emotional landscapes. Her language is swift and precise. Her vision reaches beyond the surface terrain. The result, in this impressive debut collection, is storytelling that reverberates and haunts.Deirdre McNamer, author ofAviary: A Novel

Amber Carons [work] stood out to our editors for many reasons, among them its bounty of wonderful sensory details, its assuredness of voice, its deft pacing, and the power with which it expresses human resiliency.Editors note, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

Author Bio

Amber Caron is the author of Call Up the Waters. Her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review Online, Longreads, Writers Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Reviews McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and an assistant fiction editor at AGNI, she lives and works in Logan, Utah.