The Unsettling

by Rock, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781596921719
• ISBN10: 1596921714
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-01
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Summary

A stunning, Poe-esque collection of short fiction about outsiders, lost dogs, romance, and life's surprising mysteries. Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures, the thirteen stories in The Unsettling attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed as mysterious and foreign. A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker's tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing "Rockford Files" reruns on the passenger seat; and a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance. Told through Rock's imaginative and wholly original voice, these are haunted tales about fascination, transformation, and the relationship between the two.

Author Biography

Peter Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, and This Is the Place. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and recipient of a 2000 NEA Fellowship, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Reed College.

Table of Contents

Blooms	5	(18)
Stranger	23	(24)
Shaken	47	(12)
The Sharpest Knife	59	(24)
Thrill	83	(6)
Gold Firebird	89	(22)
Lights	111	(34)
Signal Mirror	145	(14)
The Silent Men	159	(38)
Halo Effect	197	(16)
Disappeared Girls	213	(16)
Pergrine Falcon	229	(20)
Disentangling	249