Pam Durban Selected Works

Pam Durban's new collection of stories explores the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters—science, religion, family, self—the powerful act of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all.

The title story in Soon—chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology—follows two generations of a family whose lives are driven by the "patient and brutal need that people called hope, which . . . formed from your present life a future where you would be healed or loved." In "The Jap Room," winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her husband, a World War II veteran, finally come home. "Rowing to Darien" introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband's rice plantation. In "Hush" a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky's iconic Mammoth Cave. An adopted child waits for his mother to come back for him in "Birth Mother," and, in "Forward, Elsewhere, Out," a mother must come to terms with her adolescent son's sexuality. The stories in this collection deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

Durban's writing has been praised for its depth and mastery of characterization, its ability to persuade readers that the lives of the people in her stories are true, that their troubles and pleasures are real enough to matter. The nuanced and artfully rendered cast in this collection wrestles with the big questions that face us all—Why are we here? How are we to live? What matters most? The thirteen stories in Soon have appeared in earlier forms in Atlanta Magazine, Indiana Review, Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, Idaho Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, High Five: An Anthology of Fiction from 10 Years of Five Points, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Short Stories of the Century.

The collection includes a foreword from novelist and short story writer Mary Hood, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize, Townsend Prize, Lillian Smith Award, and a 1994 Whiting Award.

The seven stories in Pam Durban's widely praised debut collection are tales of family, of love and loss, of survival and affirmation. Durban's resonant prose subtly obliges her readers to experience the rush of icy water in a stream, the taste of greens freshly snatched from an overgrown garden, the dread weight of confusion and uncertainty. In "This Heat," the opening story, a mill worker faces the long-expected loss of her teenage son when his weak heart finally gives out. In the title story, which concludes the collection, a formidably eccentric woman abruptly leaves her daughter and granddaughter to answer a "calling" to do missionary work in Africa. Framed between these two stories is a gathering of characters made real and consequential by Durban's touch: a country singer more than a few big breaks short of stardom, a preadolescent boy lovestruck over his private swimming instructor, a father cut off from his children by haunting war memories, and others.

Louisa Hilliard, the last descendant of one of Charleston''s oldest families, finds her quiet life turned upside down when she comes upon the diary of one of her ancestors, which recounts the story of Diana, a 19th Century slave who worked for the Hilliards. As Louisa learns of Diana's tragic fate, she begins to sense a presence roaming in her house. Attempting to appease this presence and set right age-old wrongs, she discovers how her own life is entangled in her family's haunted history.

John and Louise Vess have conducted their lives seamlessly and honorably in the South Carolina home that has been in their family for generations. Upon John's sudden death, their daughter Annie—also a recent widow—returns to comfort Louise. But Annie finds all has changed: a gigantic artificial lake has flooded the woods she remembers, her sensible mother spouts born-again homilies, and her father's reputation is threatened by a long-hidden scandal.