Some Bore Gifts Stories [Paperback]

Fiction. A.G. Harmon's SOME BORE GIFTS: STORIES is an eclectic collection of stories spanning the traditional to the satirical, with a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and characters that includes tree cutters, department store pianists, museum guides, physicians, florists, actresses, bank managers, junk salesmen, personal trainers, and English professors. Harmon is as spellbinding in his depiction of the disenfranchised as of the socially poised, with vivid scenes of both the quotidian and the aberrant and startling. This captivating book challenges and entertains from start to finish.

A.G. Harmon is a writer of the first order. These are elegant and humble and ruminative stories of people reaching their worldly ends in one way or another, and their encounters there with grace and a hard-wrought hope. SOME BORE GIFTS: STORIES is in itself a gift, and A.G. Harmon a writer who blesses us with his art. —Bret Lott

A.G. Harmon is that rare thing, a writer who loves his characters without idolizing them. In prose that is alternately crystalline and gritty, he shows how a heart in hiding can be brought back to life through a chance encounter with another. SOME BORE GIFTS: STORIES are stories that track the movement from despair to hope, loss to restitution, the seemingly random steps we take along the road of grace. Harmon's consummate storytelling makes us believe in, not only the resilience, but also the essential grandeur of the human spirit. —Suzanne M. Wolfe

In these stories, Harmon takes you—lyrically, sometimes brusquely, always with good humor—through a gallery of lives. Some full and wise, others shallow and self-concerned, still others stunted or misunderstood—a stunning human spectrum. I laughed out loud, flipped pages in worry, even felt a knife slice through my palm. But most visceral—and this is Harmon's gift—I felt myself disappear in moments of true, transcendent beauty. —Samuel lÓ