Pam Durban's books include two collections of short stories, All Set About with Fever Trees (1985) and Soon (2015), and three novels, The Laughing Place (1993), So Far Back (2000), and The Tree of Forgetfulness (2012). Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Epoch, The New Virginia Review, and The Ohio Review, among others, and widely anthologized. Her short story, "Soon," appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1997 and twice in New Stories from the South. She has received an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa. Her novel So Far Back received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction. Her short story "The Jap Room" received the 2008 Goodheart Prize from Shenandoah. A non fiction piece, "Clocks," which first appeared in Shenandoah, also appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses, Vol. XXX. She was a founding editor of Five Points magazine and served for five years as fiction editor of that publication. She is the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNC.
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All Set about with Fever TreesAnd Other StoriesFrom"This Heat"
The words she would have said and the sound of the blow she’d gone ready to deliver echoed and died in her head. Words rushed up and died in her throat—panicked words, words to soothe, to tame, to call him back—they rushed on her, but she forgot them halfway to her mouth and he lay so still. And that’s how she learned that Beau Clinton, her only son and the son of Charles Clinton, was dead.
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All Set about with Fever Trees and Other StoriesAnd Other StoriesFrom"In Darkness"
They gave her a plate with the world’s biggest hamburger on it. It was like a cartoon hamburger, the kind she ate with her father every Saturday at the drugstore: no onion, no mustard, a frill of lettuce, and the reddest red tomato. Twice she tried to bite into it, twice the bread slipped, and a pinkish mix of catsup and mayonnaise splattered onto her plate. It was the most beautiful hamburger in the world, but she couldn’t eat it. She began to whimper.
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All Set about with Fever Trees and Other StoriesAnd Other StoriesFrom"Notes Toward An Understanding of My Father’s Novel"
In our family, it’s customary that on our birthdays we wear or assemble or plant what we’ve been given. Nobody remembers how this began, but it’s a ritual. Toward sunset on that birthday I went into the back yard and found Papa there digging holes for the azaleas Mother had given him. The yard is choked with flowering shrubs. He wore his new tennis shoes and he dug back along the fence line. He aimed each jab of the shovel. In the fading watery sunlight the skin on his forehead looked thin, the bone was a fact underneath, and seeing this I was suddenly afraid.
All Set About with Fever Trees:And Other Stories
"Durban's powerful, time-shifting narrative pulls us into all this darkness without ever turning maudlin or preachy and eventually turns up the light and turns this extremely ugly chapter out of our tumultuous near past into something miraculously redemptive." —Alan Cheuse, NPR [on The Tree of Forgetfulness]
"Durban has sewn an exquisite novel by reaching back in time and pulling her characters forward, again and again, creating an intricate and lasting design." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [on So Far Back]
"Throughout this collection the reader is privy to an uncanny visual intelligence . . . made hauntingly resonant by the careful examination of the emotional context." —The New York Times Book Review [on All Set About With Fever Trees]
Selected Works
