This collection marks the dazzling debut of a new voice in Canadian fiction. With a surgeon's skill, Natalee Caple reveals the workings of the human heart and the eternal search for love. In the title story, Lana, nursing her infant son, tells her friend Karen: "Men are a kind of blade. Even though you can see how sharp and quick they are against another woman's skin it still surprises you when you embrace them and they cut, cut through you, escaping out of your opened back." But it is Lana who wielded the knife, stabbing her lover Gary, and playing Miles Davis as he slowly bled to death. The police can understand a crime of passion, but not the music and not the darker terror that drove her to murder. These fifteen stories cut to the bone, probing the impact of passion between mothers and children, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. The results are poignant and often touched by loss. In 'The Price of Acorn,' a boarder offers a couple a washing machine in return for their only child; in 'Under Hunger,' a young girl learns to read in her instructor's bed; in 'Breathing in April,' a novelist plays out her own 'Death in Venice' fantasy as she follows a stranger to the beach. Tautly written, each of these stories challenges the traditional forms of love, while never denying its powerful nature - its joy and its often desperate conclusions.
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She has an unsettling ability to combine the atrocious and the comic. -- The New York Times Book Review, William Ferguson
About the Author
Natalee Caple was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and magazines throughout North America, including Descant, The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, The New Quarterly, and Matrix. Meow Press (Buffalo, New York) published a chapbook of three short stories in 1997. Her short story, "Inside Molly Newton", is undergoing adaptation for film.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant and beautiful short stories.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Heart is its own Reason (Paperback)
This book broke my heart with beautiful and frightening stories of strange love and fear.I especially loved Under Hunger, and Things you Tow. Caple is a great writer. You have to read this book!!
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic First Anthology of Short Fiction,
By Kevin E. Proulx (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Heart is its own Reason (Paperback)
I have to admit, I stumbled across this book. Picked it up in Halifax, finally read it months later on a flight from Toronto to Allentown... realzed, to my amazement, that I went to highschool with Natalie Caple (Mowat C.I.). It was amazing to read these stories, and I think maybe there was some cosmic force which led me to this book...This is a diverse and engaging collection of stories. I want to read more by her. So will you.
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