GOLD MEDAL WINNER, 2012 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS BOOK AWARDS
A championship basketball coach caught between his team, his family and the rabid partisans in his town. A traveling salesman consigned to a late-night bus ride. A prison inmate stripped of everything but his pride. A teenage runaway. Mismatched lovers. In his debut collection of short fiction, award-winning novelist Craig Lancaster (600 Hours of Edward, The Summer Son) returns to the terrain of his Montana home and takes on the notion of separation in its many forms - from comfort zones, from ideas, from people, from security, from fears. These ten stories delve into small towns and big cities, into love and despair, into what drives us and what scares us, peeling back the layers of our humanity with every page.
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The success of any short-story collection hinges on the author’s ability to create characters that immediately connect with readers. Lancaster (The Summer Son, 2011) excels on this point, ironically so because the inability to connect is his underlying theme. The stories, set in small towns along back roads, are populated with a sad-sack lot: an estranged father and son, a disgruntled newspaperman, miserable husbands and wives. Many of these individuals are actively engaged in running away from or toward something, the art of departure referenced in the title, often with no goal in mind other than to escape loneliness. On occasion, Lancaster, who has a gift for illuminating workaday life, relies on surprise twists to juice the plot or provide speedy resolution, as if he doesn’t quite trust the innate drama of everyday situations. He’s at his best in “Alyssa Alights,” a tale about a teenage runaway that unfolds honestly and organically. Though generally bleak in tone, Lancaster’s collection offers a glimmer of hope, concluding on a grace note with the aptly titled “Comfort and Joy.” --Patty Wetli
Review
"Have you ever felt in your pocket and found a twenty you didn't know you had; how 'bout a hundred dollar bill, or a Montecristo cigar or a 24-karat diamond? That's what reading Craig Lancaster's Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure is like--close and discovered treasures."--Craig Johnson, author of The Cold Dish and Hell is Empty
"Craig Lancaster understands the human condition, all of it. The funny, the absurd and the fault-ridden awesomeness that is each and every one of us--or at least someone we know."--Megan Ault Regnerus, managing editor of Montana Quarterly
"It's a real delight to inhabit Lancaster's lonely, darkly majestic Montana locations and desperate characters, a look at a slowly eroding 21st-century America that's as strong as many more well-known titles by major presses. It comes strongly recommended." - Chicago Center for Literature & Photography
"While it is a literary work that deals with serious themes, there isn't an ounce of pretentiousness between the covers. It's absorbing, attention-grabbing, and well-written." - Gary Robson, owner of Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana.
"Lancaster continues to weave together hope and hopelessness with his cast of haunting, unpredictable characters." - Montana State of the Arts newspaper
"I have these incredibly vivid memories of visiting Montana with my folks on family vacations, and following my dad, an itinerant laborer who worked in the oil and gas fields of the West when I was a kid," novelist Craig Lancaster says. "It was such a vast, beautiful, overwhelming place. From the first time I saw Montana, I wanted to be a part of it."
A couple of years after Lancaster's in the Big Sky State in his mid-30s, he began chasing a long-held dream: writing novels. His debut, "600 Hours of Edward," was born in 2008 in the crucible of National Novel Writing Month, that every-November free-for-all of furious writing. In October 2009, it was published by Riverbend Publishing of Helena, Montana, and has since gone on to be selected as a Montana Honor Book and a High Plains Book Award winner. In 2012, it was acquired by Amazon Publishing and re-released, gaining a whole new cadre of fans.
His follow-up, "The Summer Son," was released in January 2011 by AmazonEncore, to similar acclaim. Booklist called the new novel "a classic western tale of rough lives and gruff, dangerous men, of innocence betrayed and long, stumbling journeys to love." It was a Utah Book Award finalist.
Next came "Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure," a collection of short fiction, including pieces Lancaster originally published in Montana Quarterly magazine. That book, released by Missouri Breaks Press, came out in December 2011 and was a 2012 Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medalist and High Plains Book Award finalist.
In April 2013, Edward Stanton, the main character in Lancaster's debut novel, appears again in the eagerly anticipated "Edward Adrift," also published by Amazon Publishing.
Lancaster's work, hailed for its character-driven narratives, delves deeply below the surface, getting at the grit and the glory of lives ordinary and extraordinary.
"It's all too easy to turn people into caricatures, but the truth is, we humans are pretty damned fascinating," he says. "For me, fiction is a way at getting at truth. I use it to examine the world around me, the things that disturb me, the questions I have about life -- whether my own or someone else's. My hope is that someone reading my work will have their own emotional experience and bring their own thoughts to what they read on the page."
Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure by Craig Lancaster. Long title, good book. It's a book of short stories which all have to do with departures. It probably has something to do with quantum physics, but that's over my head. The stories, however, are not over my head.
Each one is compelling and very interesting. And each is different from the other. I really like books that contain standalone stories, especially when there's a connecting thread between them. Each story is so different, I, at first, thought it was an anthology written my multiple short story writers, but they are all the work of Craig Lancaster.
In addition to the stories being about departure, they're also about relationships. That makes sense since most of life is about relationships. As we move through our life, we're either creating relationships or breaking them. And the characters in Lancaster's book do both in memorable ways. I give Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure by Craig Lancaster a rating of Hel-of-a-Writer. Lancaster wrote an amazing collection of stories and did such a great job, I thought many different authors had written them.
Ten excellent short stories. Mostly sad or bittersweet, but with subtle characters and plot perfect for the short story format. The author focuses on typical themes of family, love, loss, honesty and integrity, but with a refreshing and personal approach. The stories are set in or around Billings, Montana or use Billings as a reference point and I wish the author had done more to describe that area or perhaps weave its characteristics into the stories. I understand the author also as written two novels. I will look for these.
Craig Lancaster has again given us a glimpse of life in small town, midwest America through a series of short stories - some of which were quite thought provoking and others were just plain entertaining. The characters are simple everyday people thrown into very real situations which are not always pleasant. Looking forward to more from this talented new author.
