Here Until August
Stories
Josephine Rowe
On Sale: 10/08/2019 | $16.95
9781948226073 | Paperback 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 208 pages Buy it Now
Book Description
“Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book.” —Michelle de Kretser
The stories in Here Until August follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are traveling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. These are people who move with the seasons. We meet them negotiating reluctant or cowardly departures, navigating uncertain returns, or biding the disquieting calm that so often precedes moments of decisive action.
In one story, an agoraphobic French émigré compulsively watches disturbing footage from the other side of the world as she attempts to keep a dog named Chavez out of trouble. In another, a young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings–on of their neighbors than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. Other stories play out against the fictional counterparts of iconic Australian and American locales, places that are recognizable but set just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant islands, sunlit woodlands or paths made bright by ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.
From the Catskills to New South Wales, from the remote and abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of a North American metropolis, these transformative stories show how the places where we choose to live our lives can just as easily turn us inward as outward.
JOSEPHINE ROWE was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and Freeman’s. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was long–listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Praise For This Book
Praise for Here Until AugustKirkus Reviews, 1 of the 30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books of the SeasonNYLON, 1 of 15 New Books to Read This Month
"Revelatory . . . Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose . . . Pitch–perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Just perusing this book makes you feel as if you’ve traveled the world, though not to the glamorous parts you might have picked had the choice been yours. Here Until August gives you the sense that its author has seen a thing or two. And that hard–won knowledge is sprinkled among her characters: gloomy realists and heartsick nobodies who feel lonely even when others are near . . . This is writing constructed to bear the load of weighty assertions like this one: 'Disaster does not care to seek us out; it simply is.' But even as a narrator may be stuck in the maelstrom of the past, Rowe manages to drive home the point that the world is not a cruel place, if you only try to engage with it." —Siobhan Jones, The New York Times Book Review
"Sharp, vivid stories . . . Rowe’s fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader’s attention." —Publishers Weekly
"Josephine Rowe demonstrates in her new story collection an uncanny ability to find moments both devastating and sublime in even the most mundane aspects of life, like a millennial Alice Munro. Each of the book's ten stories are singularly transfixing; reading them is like drifting from one lighted window to the next, bearing witness to the lives within, feeling more profoundly the darkness around you when the story ends, when you can't see inside any longer. But while you can see inside, Rowe offers exquisite, many faceted glimpses into the lives of people drifting and settled—often both at the same time—all reflecting the unnerving awareness that life's transience might be the only permanent thing there is." —Kristin Iversen, NYLON, 1 of the 34 Books You'll Want to Read This Fall
"If you liked A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably pick up Here Until August. (If you haven’t read A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably also do that.) Eavesdrop on neighbors, spend some time in the Catskills, and meet a dog named Chavez in Josephine Rowe’s new short story collection. In beautiful prose, she takes you to places you might think you know, and leaves you there to find your way out." ––Katie Yee, Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
"The Australian author's talent for relating her very human characters' rich interior lives is even more on display than in her impressive debut novel . . . Love and loss underpin these 10 stories, which follow characters' evolving acceptance of their situations, by degrees. Often, Rowe pierces through threatening clouds with humor, especially in her genuine, clever dialogue . . . These expansive tales are bound to grip, surprise, and enrapture short–story lovers." —Booklist
"Here Until August is extraordinary. Each of these stories delivers a fully, richly textured world: images that immerse, loss and longing and love and melancholy that suffuse the page, characters who live, and sentence after sentence that astonishes. A stunner of a book."" —Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories
"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." —Michelle de Kretser
"The stories in Here Until August are such rich, expansive, glorious stories, with vibrant, living characters and language that remakes the world." —Karen E. Bender
