A Sense of the Whole

by Siamak Vossoughi

Overview

The fable-like stories in A Sense of the Whole-reminiscent of the best of Kawabata, Hrabal, Lispector, and Kafka-feature characters who refuse to believe that we are unconnected, refuse to not aspire to the notion of the human family. These characters are girls and boys, men and women, Iranians and Americans, all seeking a home for the body and the soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949039115
Publisher:	Orison Books
Publication date:	11/03/2020
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Seattle. His first story collection, Better Than War, received the 2014 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, andThe Rumpus, among other places.

Table of Contents

Fourteen 9

The Vine 15

The Wedding Speech 21

The Home Thing 25

The Insult 33

Sharpness 38

The Tune 45

Bread 51

The Overpayment 57

You Are my Brother 60

Fame 67

The Deal 72

The New Man 79

Bee on A String 85

Argentina Versus France 90

Young and Old 97

Joe West's Brother 101

A Good Neighborhood 104

The Outdoor Movie 110

The Reminder 116

All Is Lost 121

Worth it To Be Wrong 129

Proverbs 134

The Trophy 140

Good Try 144

The Use of Language 149

Ihe Calendar 155

The Speaker's Apprentice 157

The Myth 161

So Long 163

Nobody Died 169

Acknowledgments 174

About the Author 176

About Orison Books 177

Editorial Reviews

Vossoughi's prose is laconic. His elliptical sentences isolate English words and sayings so as to make them newly strange…These are moral tales with uncertain answers. One might read them as anecdotal for the Iranian-American experience, but rendered in Vossoughi's epigrammatic prose they ultimately unfold through the language of the universal. Each lights on a minor encounter…and what emerges is the sense that anyone you meet has a story.

The New York Times Book Review - Jane Hu