In these finely crafted stories, David Jauss depicts the lives of ordinary people who have crossed the border into a new and dark country where what once sustained them no longer exists. A man saws his car in half when his wife and son leave him. Close to the no-hitter that will give him his chance at "The Bigs," a minor league pitcher from the Dominican Republic refuses to throw another pitch. An alcoholic attending his son's funeral discovers in a lie he once told a truth that could destroy or save him. With gentle words and acts of love, a husband succumbs to his latent brutality. A soldier in Vietnam steps on a mine that fails to detonate and enters into a new and baffling kind of war.
As the epigraph from Milan Kundera suggests, the secret of life is that "the border beyond which everything loses meaning . . . is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch." With an unerring eye for human frailty, Jauss maps this ever-shifting boundary.
As the epigraph from Milan Kundera suggests, the secret of life is that "the border beyond which everything loses meaning . . . is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch." With an unerring eye for human frailty, Jauss maps this ever-shifting boundary.
These powerful stories are about conditions of exile and the many contemporary varieties of American violence and American shame. Written with clarity and compassion and an ability to see several sides of life simultaneously, Black Maps is a moving, impressive, deeply rewarding collection from a very talented writer.'—Lorrie Moore
Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, David Jauss is author of a previous volume of short stories, Crimes of Passion, and a collection of poems, Improvising Rivers.
