The Old World And Other Stories [Paperback]

These thirty-five brief stories  and the found photographs that inspired them  are by turns realistic and surreal, bloody and tender, delightful and appalling. Award-winning author Cary Fagan has created a mesmerizing series of narrative tales, giving readers a vivid peek into lives of strangers.

A man hangs onto a runaway horse. A woman paints in the nude. A shop window advertising a sale on blankets hides much more behind it. A lone tombstone on a hill speaks of a years-long feud. The stories  capturing portraits, objects, moments in time  while dizzyingly varied, form a single image that, in the words of the author, belong to one history, found in an album that might belong to any of us.

Deftly marrying vision and language with memory and imagination, Fagan paints an intimate portrait of forgotten lives that is profound, generous, and highly entertaining.

A dazzling work of vision and imagination by awardwinning author Cary Fagan.What a dazzlingly imaginative thing to do  Cary Fagan has taken a group of orphaned photographs from the past and turned them into a cabinet of wonders! Inventive, satisfying, and deft, The Old World gets right to the heart of the storytelling craft.

Fagan's clever and wide-ranging stories put the act of imagining front and center.

Kirkus Reviews

Adults

It was the first adult party I ever held, although we werent really adults, not quite. It was the end of high school, when everything would change and we all knew it and so I desperately wanted to mark it in some way  not by getting drunk at the lake, or racing in some boys car, or just with the graduation ceremony and the dance that would follow.

I wanted a party of my own, where people would act civilized and talk about interesting things and see in ourselves the women and men we were about to become.

At least thats how I see it now, all these decades later, when Id be surprised if a stranger could look alĂ)