Transportation: Stories

Short stories by the author of THE BAD MOTHER and THE QUEENS OF MONTAGUE STREET "Nancy Rommelmann's startling stories are as compelling as they are unsettling. The worlds she creates are recognizable but also completely and wonderfully unfamiliar. She writes close to the body, and we are made to feel each uncanny detail. Transportation is a fascinating, fierce, and original collection of stories." --Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia "I inhaled this book in one sitting, thoroughly hypnotized. Rommelmann has the uncanny ability to tease out the nightmarish moments of everyday life in stories that are audacious, darkly hilarious, surprisingly tender and HDTV sharp. Fiction doesn't get any better than this." --Karen Karbo, author of How Georgia Became O'Keeffe "Somewhere between gritty and your mother's kiss on your forehead lies Transportation, Rommelmann's startling new collection. Each story crackles with violence, folding over into realms of otherworldliness, where the reader dare not look away. As the voice in the title story claims, 'There is only one escape and that is to brush away the sentimental cobwebs, get them out of your eyes quickly,' which Rommelmann does with razor-sharp precision." --Deborah Reed, author of Carry Yourself Back to Me Author and journalist Nancy Rommelmann is known for her unflinching documentarian gaze, usually focused on subjects like serial killers and Munchausen moms, con-men and homeless teens. But the stories in Transportation have an elevated, untethered quality—they are transported, and transporting. The storytelling surges at times toward sci-fi; at others, toward an unadorned magical realism. The first story in the collection, “The White Coyote,” is an intense, black-humored study of shame that takes place in a Catholic grade school gymnasium. The title story, “Transportation,” documents the metaphysical journey of two grieving parents who must literally circumnavigate the globe, on separate paths, in order to heal.