Here Until August

by Josephine Rowe

Overview

"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." —Michelle de Kretser

The stories in Here Until August follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are traveling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. These are people who move with the seasons. We meet them negotiating reluctant or cowardly departures, navigating uncertain returns, or biding the disquieting calm that so often precedes moments of decisive action.

In one story, an agoraphobic French émigré compulsively watches disturbing footage from the other side of the world as she attempts to keep a dog named Chavez out of trouble. In another, a young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings–on of their neighbors than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. Other stories play out against the fictional counterparts of iconic Australian and American locales, places that are recognizable but set just beyond the brink of familiarity: flooded townships and distant islands, sunlit woodlands or paths made bright by ice, places of unpredictable access and spaces scrubbed from maps.

From the Catskills to New South Wales, from the remote and abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of a North American metropolis, these transformative stories show how the places where we choose to live our lives can just as easily turn us inward as outward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948226080
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/08/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

JOSEPHINE ROWE was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and Freeman’s. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was long–listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Editorial Reviews

09/30/2019

The 10 sharp, vivid stories in Rowe’s first collection (after the novel A Loving, Faithful Animal) showcase characters overwhelmed by the harsh and often beautiful places in which they feel not at all at home. In “Sinkers,” Cristian takes his mother’s ashes to the lake that now, courtesy of the hydroelectric company, covers the town where she grew up, and tries vainly to locate her sunken, ravaged home under a lake that “tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky.” Severine, the narrator of “Chavez,” consumed by a grief only gradually revealed, runs from France to a grim neighborhood in a North American city, where she is saddled with a mysterious, “wolflike” dog whose owner has left ostensibly for a couple of weeks, but never returns. “What Passes for Fun,” the collection’s shortest story, more prose poem than fully developed narrative, centers on an image of the physical world that serves as metaphor for the whole volume, a sheet of dazzling ice suspended over a pond that has dropped away, apparently solid but actually dangerously fragile. While the characters’ predicaments are often familiar, Rowe’s fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader’s attention. The disorienting, sometimes fragmented prose mirrors the characters’ sense of ongoing loss and will linger with readers. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Here Until AugustKirkus Reviews, 1 of the 30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books of the Season
NYLON, 1 of 15 New Books to Read This Month


"Revelatory . . . Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose . . . Pitch–perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Just perusing this book makes you feel as if you’ve traveled the world, though not to the glamorous parts you might have picked had the choice been yours. Here Until August gives you the sense that its author has seen a thing or two. And that hard–won knowledge is sprinkled among her characters: gloomy realists and heartsick nobodies who feel lonely even when others are near . . . This is writing constructed to bear the load of weighty assertions like this one: 'Disaster does not care to seek us out; it simply is.' But even as a narrator may be stuck in the maelstrom of the past, Rowe manages to drive home the point that the world is not a cruel place, if you only try to engage with it." —Siobhan Jones, The New York Times Book Review

"Sharp, vivid stories . . . Rowe’s fiercely idiosyncratic ways of describing scenes will seize and hold the reader’s attention." —Publishers Weekly

"Josephine Rowe demonstrates in her new story collection an uncanny ability to find moments both devastating and sublime in even the most mundane aspects of life, like a millennial Alice Munro. Each of the book's ten stories are singularly transfixing; reading them is like drifting from one lighted window to the next, bearing witness to the lives within, feeling more profoundly the darkness around you when the story ends, when you can't see inside any longer. But while you can see inside, Rowe offers exquisite, many faceted glimpses into the lives of people drifting and settled—often both at the same time—all reflecting the unnerving awareness that life's transience might be the only permanent thing there is." —Kristin Iversen, NYLON, 1 of the 34 Books You'll Want to Read This Fall

"If you liked A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably pick up Here Until August. (If you haven’t read A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably also do that.) Eavesdrop on neighbors, spend some time in the Catskills, and meet a dog named Chavez in Josephine Rowe’s new short story collection. In beautiful prose, she takes you to places you might think you know, and leaves you there to find your way out." ––Katie Yee, Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

"The Australian author's talent for relating her very human characters' rich interior lives is even more on display than in her impressive debut novel . . . Love and loss underpin these 10 stories, which follow characters' evolving acceptance of their situations, by degrees. Often, Rowe pierces through threatening clouds with humor, especially in her genuine, clever dialogue . . . These expansive tales are bound to grip, surprise, and enrapture short–story lovers." —Booklist

"Here Until August is extraordinary. Each of these stories delivers a fully, richly textured world: images that immerse, loss and longing and love and melancholy that suffuse the page, characters who live, and sentence after sentence that astonishes. A stunner of a book."" —Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories

"Here Until August tracks the shimmer of precarious moments and transient moods with devastating precision. In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind. I underlined sentence after sentence as I read: for their beauty, their clarity, and their wisdom. Josephine Rowe is a breathtakingly good writer, and this is a marvelous book." —Michelle de Kretser

"The stories in Here Until August are such rich, expansive, glorious stories, with vibrant, living characters and language that remakes the world." —Karen E. Bender

From the Publisher

★ 2019-07-15
Characters in the throes of grief navigate their displacement in this collection of stories.

Taking readers from a small flat in Montreal to the vast dusty spaces of Western Australia, these 10 stories feature characters who are émigrés or travelers, a hybrid, in-between state that mirrors their inner states. In "Sinkers," a young man returns to his mother's Australian hometown to spread her ashes, though the town is completely underwater. In another story, a young Frenchwoman whose husband is killed near the Syria-Turkey border starts over in an American city and forms a melancholy relationship with a neighbor's dog ("Chavez"). For two Australian women, married to each other just 13 days, an American hotel room on a road trip is the site of an argument over which of them should become pregnant in their quest to start a family ("Anything Remarkable"). Even characters grounded in nameless suburbia, like the wife who can no longer hide her revulsion for the much-watched pornographic tape she and her husband made as newlyweds ("Post-structuralism for Beginners"), are facing down a sense of becoming unmoored, caught between where they thought they belonged and an unknowable future. Rowe (A Loving, Faithful Animal, 2017) is a writer of great subtlety, and what could, in lesser hands, be quiet stories from familiar emotional landscapes become revelatory here. Rowe's shape shifting, capturing the nuances of different nationalities effortlessly, is almost as remarkable as the precise, delicate, and frequently witty prose. As one character says of a pond that has drained away with only its frozen surface remaining: "It is magic in the sense that there is no metaphor you can build out of it that will not undermine its magic." So, too, with Rowe's work.

Pitch-perfect examinations of place and psyche from a writer to watch closely.

Kirkus Reviews