House Fires (Iowa Short Fiction Award)

These eleven stories travel from snowbound Buffalo in the 1940s to Boston, Providence and San Francisco in 1999, and across the domestic terrain of desire's unruly claims to the nuances of grief. Passion and heartbreak are often intertwined in these stories.
Does the world really need yet another book of short stories about families in crisis? If the author in question is Nancy Reisman, the answer is yes. The winner of the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award, House Fires is the work of a gifted young writer quietly pushing the boundaries of domestic realism. In the title story, for instance, she intercuts the sureties of film criticism with scenes of a family falling into chaos after a daughter's death:
I know why theorists now write about seduction and desire. And I know why they want us to wake up, to see the seams in films, to remember that images and sounds are pasted together. How else can we keep from tumbling, blindly, into fantasy?… And yet for me there is still the dream of making internal life visible. Of finding characters I can believe in…. There is the dream of wholeness. The dream of reconciliation. And there is my desire for a simple plot, for the unity that never quite arrives in daily life, for true closure. These days, I look for the sort of closure that is not false and is not death. Is there such a thing?