The Wall in the Head - Couverture souple

Carman, Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798996878505

Editeur : Hudson River Press, 2026

Synopsis

The Wall in the Head is a collection of nine short stories that capture people at moments of intense pressure in their lives—pressures that force them to re-examine who they are and what they believe to be true.

Writing fiction, in “Under the Moving Car,” Michael Carman tells of a single mother who doesn’t hesitate to crawl under a moving car to rescue a little boy. In “The Employee,” a “company man” panics at his desk under corporate surveillance. In “In Italy,” a strange man narrates his professed love for his fiancée, seemingly unaware that his behavior terrifies her.

Weaving narrative nonfiction from her own life, Carman describes making a purposeful car trip to visit an abandoned concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall fell; there she confronts old memories that change her life. A few years later, traveling in post-Apartheid South Africa, she and her husband endure a hair-raising bus ride through the Drakensburg Mountains, trying to untangle the confusions of experiencing both the beauty and the violence of nature, amid the complex oppressions of the country’s social restrictions. “Mingo Junction” is the heartbreaking story of her childhood confrontation with death in a steel mill town in Ohio just after World War II.

People under pressure come alive in these stories—caught in the squeeze between understanding and misunderstanding each other, in societies that build walls between people on a larger scale—walls personal and political, echoing each other.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Michael Carman grew up in the Midwest and moved to New York City in 1975. She holds a BA in English Literature from Columbia University and an MFA in Poetry/Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She writes poetry, narrative nonfiction, and fiction. As a poet, she is the author of The Not, a finalist in the new Women's Voices competition at Finishing Line Press, and You in Translation, in An Uncommon Accord, published by Toadlily Press. Her work has been published in such journals as The Same, The Cortland Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Spillway, Rattapallax, and Abandoned Mine. She has worked as a journalist, magazine editor, and magazine writer for publications in the Midwest and South, and as a medical publisher in New York City. She has taught writing and poetry to design students at SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, and to men and women in prisons and jails in the New York City area. She lives in the Hudson River Valley, not far from her children and grandchildren.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Hudson River Press
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798996878505
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 140
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg