Without You

by Elizabeth Buechner Morris

Everywhere there is water. Nearly all these stories explore basic human characteristics - poverty, puberty, loss, hope, aging, dementia, racism, gender identity, mischievousness, love - with the ocean or a river or a pond or a beach as background. In these stories a sailor sprinkles her husband's ashes in the Bahamas, two misfit teenagers take each other's measure on a peninsula's granite outcropping, and a man encounters a mama bear and her cubs on a remote Aleutian island. Sometimes the water is merely benign setting; more often it reminds the reader of the obstacles that all of us encounter. Intimacy is the key to these stories - the reader will feel close to these characters, even affectionate toward many of them. All will feel familiar, even intimate.

184 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2012

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and engaging stories about a wide variety of people and places. Many of them will make you nostalgic for earlier times, even if those times are only 20 years ago. One of the highest accolades I can give to a piece of writing is to compare it to the articles you see in the New Yorker, which at first glance may not interest you, but the writing is so excellent and compelling that you get hooked after very few sentences. The stories in Without You are like that. You want to read further as soon as you start them. One of the stories, "Vincent Under the Bed," is one of my all time favorites. Just masterful.