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A widely celebrated novelist gives us a generous collection of exhilarating short stories, proving that he is a master of this genre as well. Once again, "he reminds us," wrote The Miami Herald, "that great writing is a timeless art."
After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing, Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with twelve new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities - a remarkable cast of characters, primarily of the working class, proud and knowledgeable about the natural or mechanical world, their lives marked by a prized stereo or a magical sewing machine retrieved from a locked safe, boats and card games and casinos, grandparents and grandchildren and those in between, their experiences leading them to the ridiculous or the scarifying or the sublime; most of them striving for what's right and good, others tearing off in the opposite direction.
"Starred Review. Gautreaux's landscape is watery, his language fluid, his characters stuck in a world where, as one promising orphan puts it, what would be nice and what will happen are usually two different things." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Gautreaux's deft wit and empathy for his characters make for a winning collection." - Kirkus
"This collection could, at last, get Gautreaux the attention he deserves." - Booklist
This information about Signals was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Randy Bergeron
Born and raised in Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux lives there, in Hammond, with his family, and is Writer-in-Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Zoetrope, as well as the O. Henry and Best American short-story annuals. His first novel, The Next Step in the Dance, won the 1999 Southeastern Booksellers Award. His novel The Clearing won the 1999 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance SIBA Book Award and the 2003 Mid-South Independent Booksellers Association Award. He also won the 2005 John Dos Passos Prize.
Gautreaux also authored Same Place, Same Things and Welding with Children—collections of short stories. His 2009 novel The Missing was described as his "best yet" by New Orleans Times-Picayune book editor Susan ...
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"One of the most talented writers of short fiction in America." - James Wood, The New Yorker
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