Lake Song: A Novel in Stories: Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
Autor Lesley Pratt Bannatyneen Limba Engleză Paperback – sep 2025
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259542
ISBN-10: 0814259545
Pagini: 242
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
ISBN-10: 0814259545
Pagini: 242
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
Recenzii
“[An] insightful, often drily witty novel-in-stories … All of these finely crafted stories are haunted … not just by the dead but by missed connections, bungled romances, links broken between parents and children. These well-wrought miniatures add up to an engrossing multifamily epic.”—Kirkus
“Kinder Falls is home to generations of folks who might consider their lives to be ordinary. Yet in Lake Song, their beautifully told stories are overflowing with delicious details and breathtaking revelations about love, family, grief, desire, regret, revenge, and every other facet of what it means to be fractured and human. This book dazzles and surprises, from page to page and decade to decade over the course of these finely wrought characters’ lives.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
“Like the glittering lakes, rivers, and waterfalls that surge through this remarkable work, Lake Song pulses with beauty, danger, and long-hidden secrets. These linked stories are masterful and moving, and I am in awe of the vibrant, delightfully cohesive, and absolutely real world Lesley Bannatyne has created in this tour de force.” —Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists
Notă biografică
Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is the author of the short story collection Unaccustomed to Grace as well as fiction and essays in the Boston Globe,Smithsonian,Christian Science Monitor, and many literary magazines. Her latest nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. Lake Song is her seventh book.
Extras
Desire covered the land like winter—demanding, unyielding, beatific—like the miles of low hills that stretched westward, uninterrupted by mill or derrick or brick. It was this torn pocket of west central New York that the angel Moroni led Joseph Smith Jr. to Hill Cumorah to receive the golden plates that would become the Book of Mormon. Here, visions came to Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers, to Jemima Wilkinson and her Universal Friends, and to teenager Maggie Fox and her little sister Kate, who unwittingly birthed Spiritualism in their bedroom. It was called the burned-over district because there wasn’t a single soul who hadn’t been set on fire by religion.
The resources of the natural world lay beneath their feet and the kingdom of heaven above their heads, and it was this bounty that encouraged the people who lived here to move in any direction, or any dimension, that brought them closer to the divine. It made them more susceptible, perhaps, to the grifters and wayward who followed the saints; but also to the inexplicable, the miraculous, and the glorious.
It is here that you find a sprawl of lakes dug deep in the rock. Okisee was the smallest of these, and the town of Kinder Falls sprang up around it: first squatter’s shacks, then houses, barns, stores, autos, sidewalks, electricity. The town grew, languished, prospered, suffered, boomed, settled. Throughout it all, people watched the reflection of evening in the water: orange-pink-gray-dark-stars. They listened to the loon’s wail, fish thrashing for insects, waves ticking off the minutes, hours, before bed. The lake gave all these. But the lake also took: wedding rings, china, boats, watches, keys, glasses, shoes, bones, oars, tarps, umbrellas, towels, toys, shovels, wagon wheels, horseshoes, rope, spoons, pipes, canes, and souls—drunken, confused, or misled.
The lake was a diary. Wind turned the pages; canoes floated like commas.
Coaxing Sugar from the Trees
1906
Mavis
Mavis’s daddy had been dead only three months when all three Epps brothers came by her house to ask what she was going to do with the twenty-two acres of woods her father had sugared since she was born, and she told them it was none of their business. They said they’d offer her more money than she could earn sugaring, and she said over my dead body, and on the way out the youngest brother, Angus Epps, called back, it’s a real shame, Mavis Staunch, you were such a pretty girl when you were young. She was twenty-six.
Mavis didn’t care for any of the Epps brothers. Their hands were thick-fingered, and they had a way of moving—eel-like, as if their bones were soft—that made them look lazy even when they were working. She shoved her canoe into Okisee Lake and dipped her paddle deep, pulled hard, which felt good, the sensation of muscle working wood through water. The lake lay black beneath her, but the moon shed a pale smear across its surface. She peered over the side. There in the deep was her twin, ageless, hair loose and frizzed in the night’s dampness, dark circle of a mouth. Above her, busyness in the stars: the bears, mother and child, inching south in the spring sky, soon to be trailed by hunters; the water snake, long and ghostly.
Mavis ticked off what needed tending to in the morning. The maple water was rising—March already—so she’d check her trees. Next, she would speak to the Tuttle boy’s parents. An awful boy, their Harley, square-headed and fat with hair like bleached knotgrass. He’d been fishing this morning and Mavis slid across his line in her canoe. She hadn’t noticed it, or him, and he’d yelled at her to get away. A child scolding a grown woman!
A maddened yowling erupted in the distance—coyotes after a raccoon or opossum. Then an awful snarling and the screams of an animal in pain. She tried to ignore the cries of the poor, unlucky creature.
The resources of the natural world lay beneath their feet and the kingdom of heaven above their heads, and it was this bounty that encouraged the people who lived here to move in any direction, or any dimension, that brought them closer to the divine. It made them more susceptible, perhaps, to the grifters and wayward who followed the saints; but also to the inexplicable, the miraculous, and the glorious.
It is here that you find a sprawl of lakes dug deep in the rock. Okisee was the smallest of these, and the town of Kinder Falls sprang up around it: first squatter’s shacks, then houses, barns, stores, autos, sidewalks, electricity. The town grew, languished, prospered, suffered, boomed, settled. Throughout it all, people watched the reflection of evening in the water: orange-pink-gray-dark-stars. They listened to the loon’s wail, fish thrashing for insects, waves ticking off the minutes, hours, before bed. The lake gave all these. But the lake also took: wedding rings, china, boats, watches, keys, glasses, shoes, bones, oars, tarps, umbrellas, towels, toys, shovels, wagon wheels, horseshoes, rope, spoons, pipes, canes, and souls—drunken, confused, or misled.
The lake was a diary. Wind turned the pages; canoes floated like commas.
Coaxing Sugar from the Trees
1906
Mavis
Mavis’s daddy had been dead only three months when all three Epps brothers came by her house to ask what she was going to do with the twenty-two acres of woods her father had sugared since she was born, and she told them it was none of their business. They said they’d offer her more money than she could earn sugaring, and she said over my dead body, and on the way out the youngest brother, Angus Epps, called back, it’s a real shame, Mavis Staunch, you were such a pretty girl when you were young. She was twenty-six.
Mavis didn’t care for any of the Epps brothers. Their hands were thick-fingered, and they had a way of moving—eel-like, as if their bones were soft—that made them look lazy even when they were working. She shoved her canoe into Okisee Lake and dipped her paddle deep, pulled hard, which felt good, the sensation of muscle working wood through water. The lake lay black beneath her, but the moon shed a pale smear across its surface. She peered over the side. There in the deep was her twin, ageless, hair loose and frizzed in the night’s dampness, dark circle of a mouth. Above her, busyness in the stars: the bears, mother and child, inching south in the spring sky, soon to be trailed by hunters; the water snake, long and ghostly.
Mavis ticked off what needed tending to in the morning. The maple water was rising—March already—so she’d check her trees. Next, she would speak to the Tuttle boy’s parents. An awful boy, their Harley, square-headed and fat with hair like bleached knotgrass. He’d been fishing this morning and Mavis slid across his line in her canoe. She hadn’t noticed it, or him, and he’d yelled at her to get away. A child scolding a grown woman!
A maddened yowling erupted in the distance—coyotes after a raccoon or opossum. Then an awful snarling and the screams of an animal in pain. She tried to ignore the cries of the poor, unlucky creature.
Cuprins
I. Burned Over
Coaxing Sugar from the Trees
A Ten-Year-Old Boy
The Stone House
My Sixth Toe
Galen, On the Clyde River
II. Staying Birds, Leaving Birds
Red Sails in the Sunset
Twenty Golden Eagles
Prince of Worms
Le Chevalier
Prescribed Burns
Avon Calling
III. The Children of Kinder Falls
The Edge
Her Mother’s Life
The Hill Queen
If Eli
You’ll Float
Everything Wants to Be
Fourth of July
IV. Lake Song
The Room at the End of the Hall
The Final Girl
Lake Layers
Six of Swords
Acknowledgments
Coaxing Sugar from the Trees
A Ten-Year-Old Boy
The Stone House
My Sixth Toe
Galen, On the Clyde River
II. Staying Birds, Leaving Birds
Red Sails in the Sunset
Twenty Golden Eagles
Prince of Worms
Le Chevalier
Prescribed Burns
Avon Calling
III. The Children of Kinder Falls
The Edge
Her Mother’s Life
The Hill Queen
If Eli
You’ll Float
Everything Wants to Be
Fourth of July
IV. Lake Song
The Room at the End of the Hall
The Final Girl
Lake Layers
Six of Swords
Acknowledgments
Descriere
Linked stories span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward.