Overview

Tom Howard's award-winning debut short story collection, Fierce Pretty Things, won accolades for blending ""raw emotion with surreal forays into the supernatural and metaphysical."" With his second collection, Invisibilia, Howard takes the reader on a mesmerizing ride through a haunting, haunted landscape of children, drifters, soldiers, lovers, and ghosts, and the unseen forces that shape their lives. Two sisters and their parents slowly disappear, each in their own way, after a universe-shaking decision; a young solder returns broken from Vietnam to his hometown, where he must follow a set of mystifying instructions as part of a peculiar homecoming ritual; the father of an emotionally estranged teen tries to reconnect with his son through the wonder of nature and the spectacle of a bloody, nightmarish parade; a sweet but disfigured actor, renowned for the monsters he once played, seeks one final, redemptive role at the end of his career; and otherworldly scavengers haunt a city's rooftops, feeding on the memories and the stories of the dead. In these deftly crafted narratives, Tom Howard opens a window into a world that's at times wildly strange, funny, sad, and absurd, but always achingly, helplessly human.

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9781639822218

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Reviews

Metamorphosis-in many and often subtle ways-is at the heart of these riveting stories. Howard catches his characters in periods of change: a marriage ending, a life, a past reforming. New manifestations of being abound. Even more than the stories' surprising turns of events, what I found so marvelous about Invisibilia was how Howard allows a certain essential mystery to hover and resonate. -Nance van Winckel, author of Sister Zero Tom Howard's Invisibilia is a fascinating and complex exploration of nothing less than reality itself, one that superbly conveys how heartbreakingly strange and unreal the very events that constitute what we call reality can feel. Here the real is unreal and the unreal is real. But one thing is inarguably real throughout all eleven stories in this brilliant collection: the immensity of Howard's talent. -David Jauss, author of Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories and Words Made Flesh: The Craft of Fiction

Author Information

Tom Howard's stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Booth, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Among his awards are the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Willow Springs Fiction Prize. His book Fierce Pretty Things, published by Indiana University Press, won the Blue Light Books Fiction Prize. He divides his time between Arlington, Virginia and New York City.

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