Böcker av Terese Svoboda

"A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador's dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. "I've always had a knife," says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda's clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape-through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits-and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony. Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda's stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more"--

Water, its use and abuse, trickles through Great American Desert, a story collection by Terese Svoboda that spans the misadventures of the prehistoric Clovis people to the wanderings of a forlorn couple around a pink pyramid in a sci-fi prairie. In "Dutch Joe," the eponymous hero sees the future from the bottom of a well in the Sandhills, while a woman tries to drag her sister back from insanity in "Dirty Thirties." In "Bomb Jockey," a local Romeo disposes of leaky bombs at South Dakota''s army depot, while a family quarrels in "Ogallala Aquifer" as a thousand trucks dump chemical waste from a munitions depot next to their land. Bugs and drugs are devoured in "Alfalfa," a disc jockey talks her way out of a knifing in "Sally Rides," and an updated Pied Piper begs parents to reconsider in "The Mountain." The consequences of the land''s mistreatment is epitomized in the final story by a discovery inside a pink pyramid. In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda''s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us-and what it can do to us. 

Poetry. PROFESSOR HARRIMAN'S STEAM AIR-SHIP charts a contemporary landscape of violence and death while reaching for joy and aiming for flight. This courageous, powerful collection stands among Svoboda's finest work.