This Distance We Call Love

Carol Dines is a merciless, tender excavator of the human heart. Fans of Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro take note, each of these stories is a delicately calibrated wonder of pain, joy, and transformation.--Adrian Van Young, author of The Man Who Noticed Everything and Shadows in Summerland The foibles of human intimacy are writ large in these powerful stories where irony and empathy collide. Carol Dines is a writer for our times, delivering masterful, unsettling, and utterly convincing fiction that reveals what is real and heartfelt with unflinching veracity. This Distance We Call Love addresses the universal need for human connection by considering new pathways for understanding and compassion.--Patricia Cumbie, author of The Shape of a Hundred Hips and Where People Like Us Live Carol Dines brings a poetic eye and the voice of a seasoned storyteller to This Distance We Call Love. With family at the core, her stories circle around couples, siblings, friends, all wanting to love more, love better, yet fearing they don't quite measure up. Dines conveys the resilience of people who accept that not every dream comes true, who risk knowing what they cannot change, and yet learn to accept that if they fail--and fail they will--there will be second chances. These tender, beautifully wrought stories take us to the edges where things fall apart, a landscape of fraying marriages, grief, loss, doubt. And then they bring us back to love.--Miriam Karmel, author of Being Esther and Subtle Variations The novelistic short stories in This Distance We Call Love ring devastatingly true in their portrayals of characters who are learning to reckon with persisting losses, fears, griefs, and needs. I have only rarely encountered short fiction that has this kind of visceral immediacy, so surprising at all turns. The humor in these stories surprises as well: humor naturally arising from the human comedy of love limited by fearfulness yet deepened by courageous fierceness. In one of the early stories in the collection, the narrator asks, 'What does one human being owe another in this world?': that question haunts every page of this wise, beautiful book.--Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor and At the Gate of All Wonder