Sooner or later everything falls into the sea : stories

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Pinsker, Sarah

Physical Description:

286 pages ; 22 cm.

Genre:

Flash fiction.

Fantasy fiction.

Summary:

In this debut collection, you will meet runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, a touring band, under-employed Americans, retired time travelers, and doppelgängers. Explore music, memory, technology, love, and mystery in settings which range from generation ships to cruise ships to road trips, from murder houses to treehouses, in stories which are weird, wired, and hopeful. Pinsker's stories are often described as hauntingly beautiful, but Pinsker also knows the heart wants what the heart wants, and what the heart wants is not always right or easy.

Contents:

Intro -- A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide -- And We Were Left Darkling -- Remembery Day -- Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea -- The Low Hum of Her -- Talking with Dead People -- The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced -- In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind -- No Lonely Seafarer -- Wind Will Rove -- Our Lady of the Open Road -- The Narwhal -- And Then There Were (N-One)

Publication Info:

Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press, [2019]

Subject:

Flash fiction.

Fantasy fiction.

SAILS ISBN:

9781618731555

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library	PIN	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library	FIC PINSKER	SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norfolk Public Library	F PINSKER, S. SOO	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Pembroke Public Library	FIC PINSKER, S.	FICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Swansea Public Library	PBK PINSKER, S	PAPERBACK	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

"This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker's best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling." âe* Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea.

In this collection, Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.

The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story!) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

This beautiful, complex debut collection assembles some of Nebula winner Pinsker's best stories into a twisting journey that is by turns wild, melancholic, and unsettling. In the opening story, an injured farmer adjusts to living with a cybernetic arm that thinks it is a stretch of road in Colorado. "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind" tells the story of a woman piecing together her husband's enigmatic past after a stroke leaves him speechless. "No Lonely Seafarer" pits a stablehand against a pair of sirens as he attempts to save his town from its restless sailors. In all of Pinsker's tales, humans grapple with their relationships to technology, the supernatural, and one another. Some, such as Ms. Clay in "Wind Will Rove," are trying to navigate the space between technology as preservation and technology as destruction. Others, such as Kima in "Remembery Day," rely on technology to live their lives. The stories are enhanced by a diverse cast of LGBTQ and nonwhite characters. Pinsker's captivating compendium reveals stories that are as delightful and surprising to pore through as they are introspective and elegiac. Agent: Kim-Mei Kirtland, Morhaim Literary. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

In her debut collection, widely lauded author/musician Pinsker zips through road trips, space ships, speculative futures, and parallel presents with stories that are equal parts hard-wired sci-fi theory and hard-traveling rock-and-roll attitude.The 13 short stories that make up this collection range from near novella length"Our Lady of the Open Road," "Wind Will Rove," and the phenomenal "And Then There Were (N-One)"to the very brief"The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced," which clocks in at a little under three pages. Their subject matter is equally diverse. In "A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide," the main character's mangled arm has been replaced with a "Brain-Computer Interface" prosthetic which believes itself to be a road somewhere in Colorado; in "The Low Hum of Her," a family undertakes an Ellis Island-esque immigration accompanied by an AI mechanical replicate of their departed Bubbe hidden in the steamer trunk. With stories that jump from divergent pasts to possible futures and include main characters of all age ranges, genders, and social backgrounds, it would be easy for the book to become disjointed. However, Pinsker's undeniable talent for familiarizing characters caught in deeply unfamiliar situations (a treehouse that hides an alien race's architectural salvation; an 18th-century seaport town beset by sirens; folk musicians on a generational star ship whose destination they will not live to see) brings a uniting element of empathy to even the most far-fetched conceit. There are also similarities between the thematic preoccupations of the individual works. Pinsker's characters are often loners dedicated to idiosyncratic artistic pursuitslike fiddling in space or building scale models of murder houses. They are stubborn adherents to codes of authenticity that their worlds have abandoned, and the stories' plots tend to center around their revolts against conventional (or fantastical) social norms. Populated by anarchists, punks, survivalists, luddites, drifters, and rock-and-roll queers, Pinsker's stories romp through their conceits with such winning charm that even the less successfully cohesive among them delight with their nuanced detail. In spite of being hampered slightly by a tendency to invest more in the worldbuilding than in the culmination of plot, Pinsker has delivered a sturdy collection in the speculative tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kelly Link but with her own indomitable voice front and center.An auspicious start to what promises to be one wild ride of a literary career. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Pinsker's stories have murder houses that speak, dream children that emerge from the sea, and a car shaped like a narwal, but the heart of this debut collection lies in its people. The women protagonists, many of whom love women, are adapting to or resisting new ways of life: a punk musician insists on playing live and driving manually while her world depends on recorded immersive experiences and self-driving cars; a girl adjusts to a robotic grandmother as she and her father leave their home country; in Wind Will Rove, a community that left Earth long ago asks why it still holds on so tightly to Earth's history and art and whether it should let go of it entirely in order to embrace the new. A particular highlight is In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind, a story primarily about Millie's impeding loss of her husband, where the sf gem at its core takes a backseat to the tree house George built with his children and to the question of whether he did his best to make the world a better place. This collection from an exciting new voice in speculative fiction is both haunting and hopeful.--Leah von Essen Copyright 2010 Booklist