Between Here and the Yellow Sea [Hardcover]

Nic Pizzolatto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 2006

Set in a variety of Southern landscapes, these nine startling stories excavate the ambiguous terrain of the human heart. Pizzolatto finds beauty in loneliness as his characters attempt to bridge the gulfs between themselves and others, past and present, and, sometimes, the even wider chasms that separate them from their true selves.

In this stunning debut, a base-jumping, samurai park ranger parachutes off the St. Luis arch. A stained-glass artist struggles over his masterpiece for a castle in Southern Missouri and learns through great loss what his true subject will be. A schoolteacher searches for her missing son, her only clue a mysterious, paint-smeared stencil he left behind. And, in the title story, which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, an orphaned young man and his former high school football coach set out to kidnap the coachÂ’s daughter from Los Angeles and bring her back to East Texas.

With a forceful and compassionate voice, Pizzolatto places us at the crossroads of memory and desire, longing and loss, somewhere between here and the Yellow Sea.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In the nine short stories collected here, Pizzolatto, like the great Richard Ford, is drawn unceasingly to sad, even grim scenarios depicting the ways people fail to connect. And, also like Ford, he expresses their disaffection in precise language, drawing readers into perfectly realized, frequently unconventional scenarios. Loneliness, fear, shame, and alienation are the emotional currency he deals in as he tracks heartbroken moms and depressed vets. In the most affecting story, "1987, the Races," 11-year-old Dru spends his visitation weekend with his father at the racetrack. Made uneasy by his dad's emotional volatility, Dru watches warily as his father tries to flirt with a woman clearly out of his league. Dru feels a sudden surge of affection, which just as quickly changes to fear when he realizes he may share certain of his father's traits. In the title story, a young man agrees to help his football coach kidnap his daughter, who makes porn films, but their plan goes disastrously awry. These sad, beautifully constructed stories will resonate with fans of the form. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“Pizzolatto, like the great Richard Ford, is drawn increasingly to sad, even grim scenarios depicting the way people fail to connect. And, also like Ford, he expresses their dissatisfaction in precise language, drawing readers into perfectly realized, frequently unconventional scenarios…These sad, beautifully rendered stories will resonate with fans of the form.”
— Booklist

"This collection is first-rate, and Pizzolatto is going to be wowing us for a long, long time to come."
–Steve Yarbrough author of Prisoners of War

“This is a wonderful book of stories by a natural writer. Nic’s beautiful, lucid prose seems to flow like water or like music....Nic knows how to write in the marrow of his bones. This will be the first of many brilliant books. Hooray for talent, that rare and lovely gift of the gods.”
–Ellen Gilchrist, author of Victory Over Japan and Nora Jane

“Pizzolatto’s powerful fiction harkens back to the golden age of short stories when O’Connor and the rest were working. He possesses an apparently unlimited imagination and the narrative skills to bring it to bear.”
–William Gay, author of Provinces of Night

“These are bold, tender, and intelligent stories. Nic Pizzolatto writes about people who don't take loss lightly; they fight it. Whether searching for a disappeared daughter or underground son or for their own abandoned illusions, Pizzolatto's characters try to retrieve and recover their bets. That they rarely succeed doesn't matter. Interesting and beautiful things happen in Between Here and the Yellow Sea.”
–Molly Giles, author of Iron Shoes

“These stories are violent, sad, and beautiful. They hang around long after you've read them, like a long kiss, or a bruise.”
–Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and Ray in Reverse

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 275 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (May 16, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596921684
• ISBN-13: 978-1596921689
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,141,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nic Pizzolatto's fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Oxford American, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Best American Mystery Stories and several other publications. His work has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and his story collection Between Here and the Yellow Sea was named by Poets & Writer's Magazine as one of the top five fiction debuts of the year. His first novel, Galveston, was published by Scribner. It was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble 2010 Discover Award and the Edgar Award for best first novel; it won the Spur Award, and received the Prix de Premier Roman L'Etranger for best first novel (foreign) from the French Academy. He has taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, The University of Chicago, and DePauw University. Recently, he left academia to work in film and television, and now lives with his family in California.