Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Empire of the Dead

The Empire of the Dead

Daugherty, Tracy

Paperback

Series: Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 1421415801
ISBN13: 9781421415802
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: Oct 29 2014
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.63 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In the spare and deliberate stories in The Empire of the Dead, through situations both comic and bluntly melancholy, the future remains open for people-but at an indeterminate cost. Daily, characters weigh their indecision against the consequences of choice. Through a series of five linked stories, we meet Bern, a New York City architect yearning for a return to first principles-the initial euphoria, the falling-in-love that led him to consider a life devoted to sheltering others. In his ministrations to colleagues and friends, his memories of magical building feats now in the past, he learns the limits and the expansiveness of joy and need. In another tale, we meet a young painter in a Gulf Coast refinery town struggling to differentiate beauty from affliction. His sister's encounter with the singer Janis Joplin causes him to reconsider the nature of saintliness. And in the novella The Magnitudes, a planetarium director, grieving over the unexpected loss of his parents, must learn how much of the universe-both the real sky beyond his reach and the firmament cast upon the planetarium dome-he can control. Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.

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