Corpus Christi

From an acclaimed and award-winning young writer comes an intensely moving debut collection set in the eye of life's storms. In Corpus Christi, Texasa town often hit by hurricanes parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. A car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father's act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A "hurricane party" reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness sets in profound relief a man's relationship with his mother and the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love. Told in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewaland expose how often these experiences feel like the opposite of themselves. From the woman whose young son's uncanny rapport with snakes illuminates her own missed opportunities to the man confronting his wife and her lover in a house full of illegal exotic birds, all the characters here face moments of profound decision and recognition in which no choice is clearly or completely right. Writing with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their "regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before." Corpus Christi is a extraordinarily ambitious debut. It marks the arrival of an important, exquisitely talented voice to American fiction. From the Hardcover edition.

BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON has been featured in The Paris Review and Open City, as well as many anthologies, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2003 and 2004; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002; and Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he teaches creative writing at California State University, San Bernardino.


From the Hardcover edition.