Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Mar 2016
240 pages
Genre: Short Stories/Essays
Publication Information
The long-awaited follow-up from the author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection, Silent Retreats.
Forty Martyrs follows the intertwining lives of the people of Tuscola, Illinois, a small Midwestern college town that, over the course of the book, collectively experiences a spectacular fire, a terrible stabbing, and a questionable religious sighting. Through shifts in tone and perspective, Deaver's natural storytelling creates a beautiful symphonic effect, an ode to small towns and Midwestern lives.
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"Starred Review. While reducing the stories to mere summaries makes them sound like either clichés or soap operas, Deaver's solicitude - and even love - for his characters elevates them to the level of beauty." - Kirkus
"Philip F. Deaver is one of my favorite writers, and readers have been waiting a long time for Forty Martyrs. It's good to finally have this book in my hands." - Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk
"I have deeply admired, for many years, the work of Philip F. Deaver, a writer unparalleled in his examination of lost souls longing to be found. In prose that is quietly lyric, and sharp with truth, his stories are kinetic with heartbreak and magic. His work is a triumph, and I would follow it anywhere." - Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
"Filled with tenderness and pain, intimacy and clarity, Forty Martyrs resounds with Deaver's bright signature - a clear-eyed curiosity and wonder for all that travels through the human heart." - Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country
"Philip F. Deaver is a writer after my own heart. This is a funny, haunted, and haunting work of fiction, the kind of book that makes you shake your head in baffled wonder and give thanks." - David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals
"I could hardly stop reading, from first to last. These piercingly direct stories contain endless subtleties and subtexts, uniting and dividing them in the most convincing and intricate way." - Ann Beattie, author of The State We're In
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Philip F. Deaver was born in Chicago, IL, and grew up in the Midwest. He is the author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning story collection Silent Retreats, and the poetry collection How Men Pray. His poems have been featured several times on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere; and have been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Catholic Short Stories, and the baseball anthologies Anatomy of Baseball and Bottom of the Ninth. He is a Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL.
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