The Sound of Holding Your Breath
Stories
West Virginia University Press
West Virginia University Press
9781946684585
$18.99
Digital (delivered electronically)
2018-11-01
The residents of The Sound of Holding Your Breath could be neighbors, sharing the same familiar landscapes of twenty-first-century Appalachia—lake and forest, bridge and church, cemetery and garden, diner and hair salon. They could be your neighbors—average, workaday, each struggling with secrets and losses, entrenched in navigating the complex requirements of family in all its forms.
Yet tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A brother, a family, and a community fail to confront the implications of a missing girl. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. And in the title story, the shame of rape ruptures more than a decade later.
Accidents and deaths, cons and cover-ups, abuse and returning veterans—Natalie Sypolt’s characters wrestle with who they are during the most trying situations of their lives.
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“Natalie Sypolt has written gorgeous stories about a much-maligned region and a people that are too often viewed from the interstate, in photographs, or on the screen. If these viewers were to slow down and open the pages of a book like this one, they would discover lives not so different from their own, and they would find a people hewn by place, tied to one another, defined by hope and rage and heart. This is an important book by an important writer.”
Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad
“This is writing of the highest order, with a sense of place so vivid we can smell the lake water and feel the breeze as it comes up to greet us on the front porch where we’re peeling potatoes alongside characters so real they threaten to walk off the page and into our lives. Every sentence sings and every story haunts the reader in all of the best ways. A bold and important debut that announces a major new voice. It’s also the best story collection I’ve read in a long while.”
Silas House, author of Clay’s Quilt and Southernmost
Ann Pancake, author of Strange As This Weather Has Been
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