Showing results by narrator "Emily Caudwell" in All Categories

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

Chuntao is still reeling from being tossed aside by her white boyfriend - and his enchantingly cozy family - when her coworker sets her up with a Burmese-American man named Gabe Dove. Out with a fellow Asian for the first time, Chuntao finds their commonality both attractive and repellant, intimate and embarrassing, familiar, and dangerously distancing. As their relationship deepens, Chuntao is both alert and blind to her own motives, as she starts treating Gabe Dove in ways even she doesn't understand.

What happens when danger and love collide under a Navajo moon? The search for a woman who disappeared in 1906 has lead cultural anthropologist Erin Dawson to Cedar Canyon, where the iconic terrain of red rock walls and mesas keep Navajo traditions - and maybe criminal evidence - well hidden. When Erin's search leads her to cross paths with tribal policeman Adam Silverhorn, it's hardly love at first sight. But everywhere she turns, Adam is already there.

Eighteen-year-old Donna is set to marry Randy Carter, her high school sweetheart, who unlike her icy, distant father, is demonstrative and affectionate. Donna has big plans to attend college after her marriage, and the future looks promising. On the morning of the ceremony, however, as Donna pins a carnation to her father's lapel, their unprecedented closeness stirs something in her and she has second thoughts about the wedding. Her father insists on walking her down the aisle to deliver her to Randy,

As Marnie disappears into dementia, her daughter finds solace in an unexpected place. A rawly moving look at loss, identity, and the strength we draw from being allowed to care for another person.

This wickedly observed family story starts funny and turns harrowing as everyone’s secrets come up from the basement, where Emmaline lives, and sit down together for Thanksgiving dinner. The ghost in this story lives inside a vodka bottle and haunts us all.

Desperate to keep her family going after her husband's paycheck dried up in the Great Recession, Cecily signed up to be a surrogate. She's carried multiple babies for wealthy women, hoping that things will get better. But now her out-of-work husband wants her to have a baby of their own.

Ann's baby sister, Lynne, was the beautiful one, the lucky one, the one who grabbed at whatever better life she thought she could get. But when Ann is awakened one night by the unexpected arrival of her young niece, Deena, she's faced with the fact that she may be the one to live out the consequences of her sister's choices.

Helping her girlfriend dig through a hoarder's garage, an unnamed narrator with an inimitable voice ushers us into a world that is somehow both shadowy and vivid, tragically dark and life-affirmingly funny - a psychological funhouse full of tricks and sleights of hands. As she peels back the layers of three lives lived in fear, she's forced to decide how much to let her past determine her future.

Fed up with her boyfriend and her job, a woman spends the night driving around. Exhausted and drunk, she goes into what she thinks is an abandoned house and finds herself in a surreal world hosted by two old women who insist she stay as their guest and attend a birthday party.

The Glass Eaters sweeps us into the lives of Julia Duarte and her mother, Clarissa, a caterer-turned-ice sculptor, as Clarissa's long-term affair with a married man takes turns that are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but finally a reminder of how everything except desire is fleeting. This is a story that pricks at our own secret hopes about what it means to love someone forever.

When a northern California dilettante retreats to a convent for a week of introspection, writing, and a Thomas Merton study group, she is forced to confront her core beliefs. Is less truly more? Can generosity be learned? Forgiveness practiced? In this humorous send-up, short story writer Audrey Ferber channels one woman's empty nest grief and unsatisfiable desires.

An intimate portrait of the inner workings of one woman's life as a wife, mother, daughter, and friend. Theresa ponders the ways her morning-chipper husband both soothes and infuriates her, the challenges of parenting a toddler while pregnant, and the benefit of having family to rely on in hard times.

Henry turns to watch a pretty woman pass, and in that instant his young daughter, Mary, is struck and killed by a bus. Tender; gorgeously told in bold, vibrant strokes; and utterly shocking in both its imagery and its rawness, Blue Flamingo Looks at Red Water lays bare the different pathways of grief as Henry and his wife, Isabel, deal with the unimaginable loss of their child.

Taryn McKenna believes she's easy to forget. Abandoned by her parents and left behind when her high school sweetheart joined the army, she vows to never love again and throws herself into her love for the outdoors and the pursuit of a college degree - something no one else in her family has ever accomplished. Her goal, as a young teacher in the hills of North Carolina, is to leave a legacy in the lives of the middle schoolers she teaches.

After the end of World War II, Clara Kirkpatrick returns from the Women's Army Corp to deliver a dying soldier's last wishes: convey his love to his young widow, Mattie, with apologies for the missed life they had planned to share. Struggling with her own post-war trauma, Clara thinks she's not prepared to handle the grief of this broken family. Yet upon meeting Mattie, and receiving a baby quilt that will never cuddle the soldier's baby, Clara vows to honor the sacrifices that family made.

A young California woman visits upstate New York to meet her boyfriend's teenage children for the first time, reminding her of her own post-divorce childhood, and shifting her perception of her current relationship.

A neighborhood scold and avid dog walker, Melanie has had to deal with her absconding husband, her empty nest, and now the neighborhood's teenage speed demon. When their paths cross - for better and worse - she comes to see what she's really been trying to control.

A brittle young woman juggles her overbearing mother, her pregnant sister, her adoring father, and the intrigue of a handsome stranger she keeps running into. Angie's passive role in her own life, while acting as her sister's support and her mother's adversary, is upended in both the unlikeliest and likeliest of ways.

This story of love and loss begins with a childhood romance between a city girl and a farm boy up in the mountains for a summer vacation and ends on a battlefield in Iraq.