HAVE MERCY ON US
Early Praise
“I wish I had written all ten of these brilliant, tender, and beautiful stories. This book deserves prizes.”
– Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
“I loved never knowing what these characters were going to do, as the ironies of life unfolded around them. A wonderful collection.”
– Joan Silber, author of Improvement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
“Lisa Cupolo has a masterful gift for locating the most vulnerable, make it or break it, moment in a relationship, and then exploring the outcome with great insight and wisdom.”
-Jill McCorkle, author of Heiroglyphics
About the Book
In these ten beautiful and tender stories, the people are varied in age, race, gender, and origin. An old man travels to a remote village in Kenya in an attempt to bring his estranged son back home to Portland. In Calgary, against her mother’s wishes, a young woman attends the funeral of the father she never met. On holiday in Greece, a woman long married to a philandering artist asserts herself with stunning force. In an imagined, loving portrait, the writer Zora Neale Hurston is shown near the end of her life in 1948, working as a maid in a motel in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Spare, romantic without being sentimental, these powerful stories are, above all, about love, and the impossible and remarkable ways we yearn for connection
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