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Foreign Ground
The people in these eight stories all travel across the divide between the familiar and the foreign. For some it is a geographical journey, for others it’s psychological. In most it’s both.
In this arresting collection, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution arrives forty years later at a U.S. university, where his ability to teach in English is tested. A small town’s butterfly sanctuary conjures for an old woman disturbing memories of the Mayan ruins at Tikal and the civil war in Guatemala. A German bride makes the crossing from the smoke-stained city of her birth to the presumed paradise of 1913 Honolulu. A young family from the green farmland of the Midwest becomes lost in the arid mountains of New Mexico. A child raised in the shadow of Buchenwald ends up as a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. These and other stories evoke a keen empathy with characters caught in confounding circumstances.
In this arresting collection, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution arrives forty years later at a U.S. university, where his ability to teach in English is tested. A small town’s butterfly sanctuary conjures for an old woman disturbing memories of the Mayan ruins at Tikal and the civil war in Guatemala. A German bride makes the crossing from the smoke-stained city of her birth to the presumed paradise of 1913 Honolulu. A young family from the green farmland of the Midwest becomes lost in the arid mountains of New Mexico. A child raised in the shadow of Buchenwald ends up as a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. These and other stories evoke a keen empathy with characters caught in confounding circumstances.
192 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 12, 2018
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September 2, 2018
This collection of stories reminds me of The New Yorker collections of short stories. Kasten writes a variety of tales, by turns humorous, touching, and suspenseful. Her "Home Fires," competes with Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in its ability to horrify. Her characters are human with depth and complexity. I can't stop thinking about the family in "The Jack Story," and I wish she'd write a full length novel about the character Hanna from "Pacific."
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