A Place between Stations

by Stephanie Allen

 A Place between Stations explores the lives of African American characters against the ever-present backdrop of race, but with the myriad complexities of individual minds and souls in the foreground.

Two college students, bound by an intense but uneasy friendship, take an increasingly dangerous road trip through Florida. A widow faces her doubts about her long-dead husband by reliving an odd series of train rides she took along the Hudson River shoreline in the 1950s. An angry, fatherless girl roams a city at night, searching for an escape from the ambiguities of childhood. George Mattie, loner and reluctant guide, leads a misfit nineteenth-century circus caravan on an ill-fated journey through the northern Connecticut woods. In A Place between Stations, Stephanie Allen enlarges contemporary notions of what African American lives can be. Varied, to the point, and beautifully composed, this collection will appeal to all audiences.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Stephanie Allen's first book, A Place between Stations: Stories, was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction and the AWP Award Series in Short Fiction. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and the Prince George's Arts and Humanities Council. Her work has appeared in the anthology Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women and in literary journals. She has taken part in the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program in Washington, D.C., and taught classes at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, where she also teaches.

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed each of the characters in this collection of short stories, but find lately that I would much prefer the development of charcters than short vignettes. I wish she would take each story and stretch it... enrich it... Then I would love to read more.