Anne Raeff + Lisa Graley

Co-winners of the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for The Jungle Around Us: Stories and The Current That Carries: Stories talk and read from their respective works.

“Anne Raeff’s exquisite stories are remarkable for their combination of intimacy and reverence for the mysteries and private griefs her characters fold their lives around. Seldom have I read work so confident in the power of what s left unspoken and in the deep eloquence of gesture. . . .A haunting and breathtakingly beautiful book.”–Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You on The Jungle Around Us

Strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: all these lives at—or near—the end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets.”—Ron Carlson on The Current That Carries

The Jungle Around Us: “You’ll see how beautiful it is in the morning—jungle all around us,” says one of the characters in Raeff’s story collection, referring to the way that the jungle that threatens can also provide solace. The jungle in these stories is both metaphorical and real, taking the reader from war-torn Europe to Bolivia and from suburban New Jersey to Vietnam. Raeff examines how war and violence, like the jungle, seep into our lives, even when we are no longer in danger and long after the war is over.

While struggling with fear, danger, and displacement, the characters of The Jungle around Us form strange and powerful bonds in distant and unlikely places. A family that has escaped Vienna ends up on the edge of the Amazon, where the parents fight yellow fever and the daughter falls in love with a village boy. Two sisters learn lessons about race and war during the Columbia University riots of 1968. A young girl confronts death when her former babysitter is mysteriously murdered. In Paraguay, two adult sisters confront their loneliness while their precocious young charge faces off with a monkey. Raeff’s stories are about embracing the world though the world contains everything we fear.

Anne Raeff teaches English and history at East Palo Alto Academy. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica. Her first novel is Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia.

The Current That Carries: This collection bristles and hums with the rugged resilience one encounters in southern and Appalachian fiction, where ghosts of loved ones and livestock alike haunt an underworld of lonely trails. Set in West Virginia, the stories take up residence with rural characters who defend their mailboxes against teenagers, bathe and feed their bedridden elders, and circle the inflated orbs of love and desire in high school gymnasiums. Whole lifetimes flare in an instant as characters scramble to sift through the past’s wreckage to find some small miracle in the present.

If there is nostalgia, it’s for a South without billboards, talk shows, and children with iPods dangling from their ears. It’s for a South where you can go pick a ripe tomato to slice for the mayonnaise on your sandwich because you found time to plant a garden. And if there’s grace, it is in the careful wading through a shifting current to reach possibilities snagged at the bottom of a trotline.

In lean, muscular prose, Graley pays homage to the daily chores that make up a lifetime. With delicate precision, she renders the boundaries, as thin as the blade of a shovel, between fear and courage, rejection and compassion.

Lisa Graley is an assistant professor of English and humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the author of the poetry volume Box of Blue Horses. . Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, the Georgia Review, and the McNeese Review.