"Easily ranks among the best fiction I've read this year." --David
Abrams
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**
"If you've come to look for America, it's here in The Big
Impossible. Taut, urgent, emotionally powerful stories about the
families, workers, and dreamers who are our neighbors, and Delaney's
range and sense of history make him the perfect writer to illuminate
their lives." --Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
The short fiction in Ted Delaney's new collection explores guilt and
redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest
hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of
institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady.
In "Clean," a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it
will play against him. In "House of Sully," a working-class family
navigates the tumultuous year that 1968 was, as new perceptions shake
long-held and dependable, if sometimes misguided, beliefs. Other stories
examine the inner life of a school shooter, the comical posturing of
writers at a literary party, a British veteran of The Great War living
at a Florida retirement home but haunted by his losses, and a man's
bittersweet visits to past lives via Google Street View. In the sequence
set in the West, an itinerant worker moves across the Great Plains,
navigating stark landscapes, trying for foothold.
The Atlantic's C. Michael Curtis praised Ted Delaney's debut
collection for its "moral intensity . . . in the tradition of writers as
varied as Ethan Canin and William Trevor." Two decades later Delaney
returns to the short fiction form with utter mastery.
