Lydia Peelle is the author of the novel The Midnight Cool (2017) and the story collection Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing (2009), which received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She received her MFA from the University of Virginia and has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ucross, Yaddo, and Ragdale. Peelle is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Prize, the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honor, a Whiting Award in Fiction, and the Anahid Award for Emerging Armenian-American writers. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Sun, Orion, and Prairie Schooner. She is a former speechwriter for the Governor of Tennessee and has also worked as a wildlife rehabilitator and English teacher. She is currently on the faculty of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA program and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Reasons for and Advantages of BreathingStoriesFrom"Phantom Pain"
Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.
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Reasons for and Advantages of BreathingStoriesFrom"Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing"
I come home the next evening to find a dark snake draped across the foot of the bed. Motionless, waiting for my next move. I freeze, thrilled to the sheer shock of it. My pulse rips with terror and delight. Fingers quivering, I switch on the light. But it is only my husband’s limp black sock, left from last night. Caught where it landed when we pulled off our clothes once words had failed us, as they always have.
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing:Stories -
Reasons for and Advantages of BreathingStoriesFrom"Shadow on a Weary Land"
The first time Jesse spoke to him, Dave was lying on the Musician’s floor, and he sat up and said, Holy shit, the Lord speaketh, and Jesse said, No, man, listen, it’s Jesse James. Last week, over an after-dinner joint, Dave told the Musician that Jesse said that his brother’s treasure was buried somewhere along the ridgeline. Can Jesse be any more specific? the Musician asked, taking a hit. No, man, Dave said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. I don’t want to bug him.
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing:Stories
“With humor and insight, these sharply etched fictions illuminate turning points . . . in lives conscribed by limited horizons . . . Peelle vividly evokes a setting and brings its inhabitants . . . instantly and convincingly to life.” —The Boston Globe [on Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing]
“Peelle’s acute perception of a squandered world inspires complex, suspenseful stories that celebrate life’s endless improvisation and assertion . . . darkly lyrical, ironic and compassionate stories . . . brilliant and stunning.” —The Kansas City Star [on Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing]
“Lydia Peelle’s lovely, fluid voice lures you into a world full of heartbreak and devastation . . . calls to mind masters of the unsettling short story like Mary Gaitskill, or even Alice Munro . . . [Peelle] has the makings of a writer who defies labels and creates her own categories.” —The New York Times Book Review [on Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing]
Selected Works
The Whiting selectors admired “her beautiful prose, gorgeous sentences, flawless ear,” and noted, “These are very dark stories; her vision is severe. While she never confronts it didactically, her sorrow about what we are doing to ourselves and to our planet is overwhelming. The scope of her vision takes in a great sweep of life in the present, but is also steeped in a very present sense of history, of how impossible it is to escape the fated paths laid down by people we never knew, as well as by our own younger selves in our inevitable ignorance. These stories-while working perfectly as short stories-suggest the kind of epic vision usually found in novels.”