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Stories
by Jean Ryan
Jean Ryan's debut collection tells stories of nature and of human nature. The characters who inhabit Jean Ryan's graceful, imaginative collection of stories are survivors of accidents and acts of nature, of injuries both physical and emotional. Ryan writes of beauty and aging, of love won and lost-with characters enveloped in the mysteries of the natural world and the animal kingdom.
In "Greyhound," a woman brings home a rescued dog for her troubled partner in hopes that they might heal one another-while the dog in "What Gretel Knows" is the keeper of her owner's deepest secrets. In "Migration," a recently divorced woman retreats to a lakefront cabin where she is befriended by a mysterious Canada goose just as autumn begins to turn to winter. As a tornado ravages three towns in "The Spider in the Sink," a storm chaser's wife spares the life of a spider as she anxiously waits for her husband to return. And in "A Sea Change," a relationship falls victim to a woman's obsession with the world below the waves.
The world is at once a beautiful and perilous place, Jean Ryan's stories tell us, and our lives are defined by the shelters we build.
"Ryan controls devastating psychological material with tight prose, quick scene changes, and a scientist's observant eye." - Publishers Weekly
"With spot-on observations and deep compassion, Jean Ryan writes about loss and longing, grief and love, and about the human ability to go on...This book will bring you closer to the things that are important in life." -- Lori Ostlund, author of The Bigness of The World
"Jean Ryan's Survival Skills offers a wry look at the ways in which intimate relationships, ambitions, and desires are often foiled and skewed by the natural world." - Henriette Lazaridis Power, author of The Clover House
"Ryan is not only a gifted wordsmith but a skilled anthropologist, creating, analyzing, and pulling apart at the cross section of each character." - The Summerset Review
"Jean Ryan is a wise and witty voice in contemporary American fiction. The keenly observed stories in Survival Skills shine with insight, intelligence and, frequently, a most welcome portion of humor. This is fiction that matters." - Mary Kalfatovic, Editor, The Committee Room
This information about Survival Skills 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.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in Napa, California. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Other Voices, Pleiades, The Summerset Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Blue Lake Review, Damselfly and Earthspeak. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, she has also published a novel, Lost Sister.
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