Brad Kessler's novel Birds in Fall won the 2006 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the top ten books of the year. He is also the author of the memoir Goat Song (2010) and the novel Lick Creek (2002). His non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Bomb. Kessler is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, in Vermont, where they raise a small herd of dairy goats and produce cheese.
-
Birds in FallA Novel
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
Birds in Fall:A Novel -
Birds in FallA Novel
The woman couldn’t say when they were likely to arrive. Two days, three days, perhaps more. Everything depended upon the search and rescue—and if any of the 242 passengers could indeed be found—and whether their surviving family members actually wanted to make the trip to Trachis. Of course, she said, the airline would fully compensate the inn. Most people probably wouldn’t come, she speculated. But the island was the nearest landfall to the crash, and some no doubt would want to travel there—“for closure,” she added.
Birds in Fall:A Novel -
Birds in FallA Novel
During World War II high-flying pilots over the Atlantic often puzzled over phantom specks that showed up on their radar screens. “Radar angels,” they dubbed them and wondered at the faint apparitions, only to learn years later that they were actually birds migrating over open water. Birds, like humans, are mostly moisture—they’re ninety percent water—and a flock of finches on a radar screen shows up like a small weather system: one or two green dots. On a night of heavy migration in autumn or spring, a radar screen blossoms with fleeting spectral dots.
Birds in Fall:A Novel
“Birds in Fall is a luminous tribute to Kessler's abiding and respectful faith in the power of storytelling: There's bold engagement here with the most contemporary fears and the most eternal preoccupations (fate, loss, mourning, healing). If, at times, Kessler's threading through of mythology and ornithology feels like an effort to beautify the ugly reality of what happens when a packed airliner explodes into a million pieces, his instincts are true when he writes, ‘How is a story like a bird? It keeps us aloft.’” —Los Angeles Times
“Birds in Fall is a dramatic and strikingly poetic novel of nature's glory and humankind's imagination and capacity for adaptation transfiguration, especially the metamorphosis of grief into love.” —Chicago Tribune
“Migratory birds flutter through Brad Kessler's elegant new novel, an avian metaphor for the strength of the human spirit. [A] slow-burning meditation on grief and survival . . .” —The Economist [on Birds in Fall]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop
