Apparition & late fictions : a novella and stories

Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction collection by the award-winning author of The Undertaking . The Barnes & Noble Review Sex and death . . . are the only subjects worth thinking about, a widowed poetry professor instructs her students in one of the stories filled with both in Thomas Lynch's Apparition and Late Fictions . Lynch, a Michigan funeral director and poet, cited the same Yeats assertion, clearly a touchstone for him, in his wonderful book of personal essays about the dismal trade, The Undertaking (1997) . Like his essays, Lynch's fiction also concerns love and grief, which share the one body. His characters are embalmers, casket salesmen, poets, ministers, fishing guides, and the widowed professor whose creepy infatuation with a beautiful teenager at a fancy Mackinac Island resort evokes Thomas Mann's Death in Venice . They mourn husbands, wives, parents, and young girls who are gone but not forgotten. Less fondly, they also remember exes, for whom A little Good Riddance goes a long way. The small-town assistant pastor in the title novella discovers his true calling only after his wife leaves him and their two children for greater excitement. After rediscovering the balm of sex with a generous stranger, he writes a lively manifesto to faith in flux called Good Riddance -- Divorcing for Keeps that proposes that some divorces, like some marriages, are made in heaven . It's a game changer in his life, much, we suspect, as being left with four small children and later publishing The Undertaking were in Lynch's. It's interesting to see some of the same themes treated with the additional elaboration and nuance of fiction, but for sheer impact, it's hard to compete with the plainspoken directness ofLynch's morbid but moving real-life tales from the mortuary. Heart-rending stories of life and death: a debut fiction collection by the award-winning author of The Undertaking . A Methodist minister gone astray, a grieving trout bum gone fishing with his fathers remains, an artist overwhelmed by incarnate beautythese are just a few of the iconic yet utterly unique characters in Thomas Lynchs spirited collection. Set in Michigans north woods, in Ohios interior, on islands, in casinos, and in distant cities, these stories are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, these are pilgrims haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements. With the elegant prose of Frederick Busch and the Irish sensibility of William Trevor, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for connection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach. "These stories are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, these are pilgrims haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements." -- Dust jacket. A collection of stories and one novella are linked by characters that are gone but not forgotten--former spouses, dead parents and missing children--with those that miss them haunted by memory. Catch and release Bloodsport Hunter's moon Matinée de septembre Apparition.