Possession(s)

“Smolens’s prose . . . is an understated marvel.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“‘A good story’s a kind of miracle,’ John Smolens writes in this book, and it’s as good a description as you’re going to get. No one needs a story exactly until you do, and when we do, it’d better be good, as these are. A Smolens story loves conversations. What fills the spaces between people is his medium: the awkwardnesses, the surprise intimacies, the slights and turns, the space between intention and action, and lingering regret and disappearance—all the charged spaces in which we address and remember one another. You will remember these stories.”

—Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities

“When you open John Smolens’s Possession(s) to start reading, prepare yourself. You will be entering a world unlike any other. You will travel everywhere from an identity-shattering Upper Michigan town to catechistic Boston to dung-strewn nineteenth-century Paris and myriad places beyond. The stories in this book chill, elate, amaze, shock, splinter, and awe, with breathtaking intensity. Yet what connects them is the frenetic, living energy contained within each of them. Possession(s) is a gem by one of Michigan’s, no strike that, one of America’s masters.”

—Michael Zadoorian, author of The Leisure Seeker