Landfall
Subtitle
A Ring of Stories
Winner of the Ohio Non/Fiction Collection Prize. In this ring of connected short stories, grounded in the fictional town of Conrad’s Fork, Kentucky, everyone is staging some sort of escape. A woman harboring the dark truth about her youngest daughter’s birth, a new teacher suddenly under suspicion after a student’s disappearance, a young girl witnessing her older sister’s sexual awakening: all the people in this Appalachian community suffer a paralyzed desire in response to the stagnancy and exposure they experience in their small town. Landfall: A Ring of Stories weaves together the voices of two generations of mountain families in which secrets are carefully guarded — even from closest kin. One by one, those who leave confront the pull of the land and the people they’ve left behind. Perhaps Conrad’s Fork will save them, or, perhaps, in the wake of urban encroachment and shifting family systems, they will save it.
Bio
Julie Hensley earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Arizona State University in 2002.
Praise for this book
'Landfall' signals the emergence of a masterful new writer. Each sentence is a gem, polished up so that each paragraph, each page, and each story shines, resulting in a book that is so lovely and lyrical that readers will feel as if they are luxuriating in a sea of words. Hensley’s wonderful fiction has been showing up in some of the best literary journals for years now, and I’m so glad that we finally have a book to savor – and to share with others. 'Landfall' is a wonder. So is Julie Hensley.
Silas House Author of 'Clay’s Quilt' and 'Same Sun Here'
