Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival - Paperback

by Joeann Hart (Author)

2022 Hudson Prize Winner

A young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant's grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories from HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with Covid, ecological destruction, grief, or mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.

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"JoeAnn Hart's extraordinary stories take you on a trip: to a dystopian future; to the tidewaters of Gloucester; to the chambers of a haunted mill. But in the end, the real place she takes us is the center of the human heart. These unforgettable tales are generous, brilliant, and fierce." - Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There, and co-author (with Jodi Picoult) of Mad Honey

"In her short story collection, HIGHWIRE ACT & OTHER TALES OF SURVIVAL, JoeAnn Hart's characters go to the sea, deadhead flowers, eat artisanal pizzas, with humor and with humanity. These luminous stories shine long after you've read them." - Ann Hood, author of Fly Girl

Author Biography

JoeAnn Hart is the author of Arroyo Circle, a novel of reclamation in a time of loss, forthcoming from Green Writers Press in October 2024. Other books include the prize-winning environmental fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, (September, 2023) the crime memoir Stamford ' 76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics, and Addled, a social satire. Her short fiction and essays have been widely published, appearing in Slate.com, Orion, The Hopper, Prairie Schooner, The Sonora Review, Terrain.org, and many others. Her work explores the relationship between humans, their environments, and the more-than-human world.