When: Stories

by Katherine Zlabek

A bull’s heart simmers in a crockpot, echoing the household’s tension in a retelling of Biblical Jacob’s trials. A priest observes his congregation’s descent into madness and wonders at his own role. An elderly woman imagines herself into her boomtown’s history and eventual abandonment at the height of the Gold Rush. Towns and people vanish, daughters return, women prepare escapes, and animals invade. In this collection of stories situated within the mythology of the Midwest, the past is always present, tangible and unrelenting, constantly asking these characters whether they will be a sacrifice or a martyr, daring them to give in without a fight. Here, transcendence is a tonic hard-earned by the battered soul.
The atmospheric stories in  When  illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
 

156 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2019

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction (now called The Journal Non/Fiction Prize)! This is a series of lovely, quiet, deep connected stories illuminating the ordinary lives of people living in the Midwest. It shows them as the humans they are. Zlabek has a fun eye for detail, and the prose is rich with moments that make you smile, or nod, or say to yourself, ‘well, she nailed that one.” I loved reading it.