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Foreign Climes: Stories
How far do we have to travel to come face to face with ourselves?
Foreign Climes is a collection of short stories linked by place, or more exactly by the strangeness of new places, new territories both geographical and psychological. It proceeds from a young person's sense of boundaries to an older person's breaking through boundaries-and then beyond, to a voice that constructs the world by way of possibilities both found and left unexplored.
Some of the stories take their protagonists literally to strange, unsteady ground. A teenaged narrator travels from leafy North Carolina to the desert to engage in battle against a boy he calls "Minnesota," a stand-in for a greater battle against his parents' dissolving marriage. A young Pashtun woman from northern Pakistan finds herself in cold New England amid the overwhelming landscape of her own desire. An American working abroad struggles to find her place in a relationship that seems unbound by language.
Other stories encounter alienation closer to home. A swaggering poker shark confronts a brutality unleashed by the exploitive nature of his world. A woman leaving her marriage finds an entire life in the lineaments of a house she'll never inhabit. A mother crosses a chasm to reach a son steeped in mania.
"People don't change," the poet Charles Olsen wrote. "They only stand more revealed." These stories reveal the heart and the potential of the people within them by thrusting them into those places of discomfort and exhilaration that leave us all naked before the world.
Foreign Climes is a collection of short stories linked by place, or more exactly by the strangeness of new places, new territories both geographical and psychological. It proceeds from a young person's sense of boundaries to an older person's breaking through boundaries-and then beyond, to a voice that constructs the world by way of possibilities both found and left unexplored.
Some of the stories take their protagonists literally to strange, unsteady ground. A teenaged narrator travels from leafy North Carolina to the desert to engage in battle against a boy he calls "Minnesota," a stand-in for a greater battle against his parents' dissolving marriage. A young Pashtun woman from northern Pakistan finds herself in cold New England amid the overwhelming landscape of her own desire. An American working abroad struggles to find her place in a relationship that seems unbound by language.
Other stories encounter alienation closer to home. A swaggering poker shark confronts a brutality unleashed by the exploitive nature of his world. A woman leaving her marriage finds an entire life in the lineaments of a house she'll never inhabit. A mother crosses a chasm to reach a son steeped in mania.
"People don't change," the poet Charles Olsen wrote. "They only stand more revealed." These stories reveal the heart and the potential of the people within them by thrusting them into those places of discomfort and exhilaration that leave us all naked before the world.
173 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 15, 2021
3 people want to read
About the author
Lucy Ferriss
21 books59 followers"Vivid, compelling, as ineluctable as a Greek tragedy." So writes Claire Messud (THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS) of Lucy Ferriss's forthcoming novel, A SISTER TO HONOR.
Born in St. Louis, Lucy has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. Her recent novel THE LOST DAUGHTER was a Book of the Month pick and a Barnes & Noble bestseller. Her memoir UNVEILING THE PROPHET was named Best Book of the Year by the St. Louis Riverfront Times; her collection LEAVING THE NEIGHBORHOOD won the Mid-List First Series Award. She lives with Don Moon in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College. She has two strong sons and abiding passions for music, politics, travel, tennis, and wilderness. To research A SISTER TO HONOR, she traveled to the northwest provinces of Pakistan and came to know its people, their hopes and their challenges both at home and in America.
Born in St. Louis, Lucy has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. Her recent novel THE LOST DAUGHTER was a Book of the Month pick and a Barnes & Noble bestseller. Her memoir UNVEILING THE PROPHET was named Best Book of the Year by the St. Louis Riverfront Times; her collection LEAVING THE NEIGHBORHOOD won the Mid-List First Series Award. She lives with Don Moon in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College. She has two strong sons and abiding passions for music, politics, travel, tennis, and wilderness. To research A SISTER TO HONOR, she traveled to the northwest provinces of Pakistan and came to know its people, their hopes and their challenges both at home and in America.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 22, 2022
You will wonder how one writer can inhabit so many relatable characters, whether a boy at a tennis tournament, a young woman finding her way through a harrowing experience in a foreign land, or an elderly mother smarting from a clear message she is not wanted. Each story explores a “foreign clime,” whether in the landscape of the mind or in an unfamiliar region of the globe. These stories remind us there is often no better form of travel than through the pages of a book.
January 31, 2022
What an impressive range of voices and settings in this collection by Lucy Ferriss, each story a mini-trip of its own. I can see why it won the Brighthorse Books Prize for Short Fiction. Highly recommend!
May 21, 2023
The stories range widely in their settings, characters, and details…but they stylistically are similar in their directness, the moments of revelation or awareness that each contains, and the sense that, as the stories end, these lives will go on, but maybe in a different way. Except for the last story, these are all pretty conventional in structure and language…but they are well written and engaging.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews