An Orphanage of Dreams: Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

An Orphanage of Dreamsis a collection of stripped down visitations-flash fictions of smoke breaks and long drives and friends who finally stop showing up. The acidic tang of disappointment is here, and sparks of biting insight, in portraits of people and animals, in all our absurdity and failed attempts at meaning. As Sam Savage says, 'what a life'.

Praise for Sam Savage:

'Savage's is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that.' New York Times Book Review

'A Southern childhood in duskier, Tennessee Williams times, offering an aphoristic scattering of memories one- and two-sentence stand-alones that spill isolated down the page like little gems...showing us how memory works and how we make sense of our lives, drip by drip and sensation by sensation.' Library Journal

'With paragraphs as rich as koans, this is as powerful a meditation on living life and facing its end as you are likely to read anytime soon.' Booklist

Reviews

Savages narratives are bravura displays of authorial concision and meticulous detail.Publishers Weekly

An Orphanage of Dreams . . . implores you to slow down and savor the final writings of a man who had a lot to say. Isthmus

An Orphanage of Dreamsis a collection as quiet and new as the dawn. These surprising parables, not unlike Primo Levis, made me feel part of a kinder, larger world. Anyone who has suffered and still dares to hope should read this book by the extraordinary writer Sam Savage.Kate Bernheimer

Open the door of thisOrphanage of Dreamsand walk as if on clouds. Dreams reveal, condense, betray, distort, translate, highlight, let slip, point to a higher truth. And so do these stories, a delicate lattice of language and longing. A thorough delight for the senses. Your waking hours will never be the same.Cristina Rivera Garza

With his last literary breath, Sam Savage has once again given readers insight into those we may think to pass by hurriedly or who we might not notice at all. Big Other

Praise forSam Savage

Savages is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: torecognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that.New York Times

Savages lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age.Star Tribune

Author Bio

Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, The Way of the Dog, and It Will End with Us. A native of South Carolina, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University. He was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the PEN L.L. Winship Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Savage resides in Madison, Wisconsin.