Somewhere A Phone Is Ringing: The Collected Stories Of Nancy Bourne - 9781941066584

In her last nine years, Nancy published thirty-seven stories, a remarkable number, with a variety of settings and human predicaments. A lawyer in a small 1960s southern town pretends his political campaign is not racist ("Massive Resistance"). Touring Iran, an autistic expert on Persian art falls prey to religious police ("Stalking the Sprouted Stag"). In juvie for dealing drugs, a girl sends her friend's brother to the penitentiary and deftly punishes a teacher she distrusts ("American Girl"). A widower's demands that his daughter preserve her chastity contribute to her death, racking him with guilt ("A Case for Wrongful Death").Characters in many of these stories find it hard to interpret or transmit messages about their own or others' inner feelings and needs. The messages can be scrambled by differences in social class, family income, and education but also by racial prejudice, neurological disease, and sheer chance. In "Intent for Love," an unworldly, simple man who teaches laundry skills to prisoners tries hard to romance a woman who is a prison guard. Both are shy and lonely, but the friendship comes to naught because neither can transmit nor decipher their dramatically differing needs and expectations. In "Memorial Mansion," social pressure driven by racial prejudice requires a librarian to make a stark choice between sending a black woman to jail or lying in court to protect her own son. In "Going Under," a young teenage boy, Gordy, tries to help a girl in his school, Brenda, prepare to be baptized in his church. When he sees she is worried, Brenda replies, "Gordy, you have no idea." After she does not attend the baptism, Gordy discovers that she and her father have suddenly left town. He is too innocent to understand the girl's plight and her father's role in it.Nancy's characters scramble, fake, or misread messages, but her prose does not. Alert readers may sniff a mystery and be saddened, amused, or even horrified but the stories offer few hints on how to prevent misreadings or alleviate the consequences. Nancy raises questions but does not pretend to know every answer.

• | Author: Nancy Bourne
• | Publisher: Wordrunner Press
• | Publication Date: Jul 21, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 462 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1941066585
• | ISBN-13: 9781941066584