A Different Harbor

by Elizabeth Genovise

Fiction. The impulse to salvage, to resurrect, is always with us. The stories in A DIFFERENT HARBOR portray lives that have all the depth and wild weather of the Great Lakes, but are in desperate need of affirmation. From a child who has lost his mother, to a woman struggling to move on after a disastrous marriage, the characters in these stories flail for any chance to revive what they have lost. They collect fossils and watch old home videos; they chant mantras in the shower to remind themselves of who they are; they keep dried leaves under glass; they retell their own most painful stories just for the sake of keeping them alive. They find that sometimes it is possible to bring back the dead, but never in the way they had imagined. Often, the best they can do is to acknowledge the latent beauty in loss itself—which just might be enough to carry them through.

"With a quiet self-assurance, Genovise lays claim to a landscape strewn with wreckage. Plagued by ghosts of mothers and lovers and long absent friends, these storm-tossed characters suffer losses too terrible to tally. But still, they cling to hope—a stranger's interest, a recovered dream, a sister's understanding. In this beautifully imagined world, so much like our own, just staying afloat seems an astonishing victory."—Neil Connelly

"The stories in Elizabeth Genovise's A DIFFERENT HARBOR stake out territory on the tipping point. As in all the best fiction, these stories feature characters whose lives are in conflict with where they've been and where they're going. Things will change for them, but Genovise's vivid, sparkling prose tracks each journey with compassion and grace. This is a remarkable debut from an exceptionally talented writer."—Christopher Lowe

82 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2014

About the author

Elizabeth Genovise grew up in Villa Park, Illinois. She graduated from the MFA program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and considers her time in the Deep South to be the best of her life. Since then she has published three collections of short stories via small presses- A Different Harbor, Where There Are Two or More, and Posing Nude for the Saints- in addition to a chapbook, The Stone Pear. Her fourth book, Palindrome, is due out from the Texas Review Press in 2022.


Elizabeth is a 2016 O. Henry Prize recipient and her stories have appeared in The Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Pembroke Magazine, Appalachian Heritage, and dozens of other literary journals. She teaches college composition and literature, and also works as a private creative writing coach for aspiring authors. She and her husband Chris live near Knoxville, Tennessee in a home that is half writer's studio, half woodworking shop (where's the dining room???). Someday, she'd like to live in a lighthouse on Lake Michigan, and she is currently at work on a novel set in on those shores.