Undercover space aliens share an RV outside Tucson. A high school girl tries to make sense of the shooting of Gabby Giffords. Basketball fans stalk their team’s head coach. A young couple falls in and out of love over the course of several lifetimes. And teenage cross-country athletes run on and on through these ten stories set amid the strange desert landscapes of the American Southwest. Desert sonorous is a unique and energetic debut collection, blending realism with flashes of experimentation. Contemporary issues—immigration, drought, shootings—hover above a cast of memorable characters in search of life’s deeper meanings. As they struggle along, comic and resigned, intelligent and quiet, sad and frustrated, their strivings resound because their lives are in so many ways our own.
Author
Much of the following is true: Sean Bernard is: a cheerful sort; a member of a secret organization hatched in a southwestern city in the fall of 1993; author of the collection Desert sonorous (March 2015), winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, as well as the novel Studies in the Hereafter (August 2015), a thickly veiled novel set in heaven; a winner with a can-do attitude but an inconsistent backhand; reliant on various supplements for reasons that cannot be disclosed; the editor of Prism Review; the best durned creative writing teacher a student could ask for; wanted.
