Visitations: Stories (yellow Shoe Fiction) [Hardcover]

Peoplethe species defies logic! reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the storys narrator has wronged or been wronged by.

Uptons stories frequently draw inspiration from booksbooks as art objects or lost objects, as inspiration or points of contention. Night Walkers tells the story of the worlds laziest book club, while A Storys End follows a womans search for the last book read by her mother before her sudden death. Elsewhere, the ghosts of literature and writers past haunt the characters present: The Tell-All Heart sees a woman falling in love with Edgar Allan Poes discarded suit, and an unruly, unpredictable shadow creeps in a childs window to demand that he cut off the other hand of Captain Hook in A Shadow.

In the surreal yet playful tradition of Karen Russell and George Saunders, Visitations brings together seventeen incandescent short stories from a writer at the height of her powers.