The Long Swim

‘Svoboda’s world is imaginative, inevitable, and narrated with emotional precision. Equal parts mercurially strange and delightful.’—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Lit

‘The Long Swim delivers a world of families broken and reassembled—of troubled parenthood seen through the eyes of children and parents; marriages, lovers, and friends betrayed. . . .Almost any paragraph can read as a poem, and every story as a tiny epic, elliptical and suggestive, constructed of gaps and white spaces, attending as carefully to what’s omitted as to what is directly expressed.’—Catherine Gammon, Necessary Fiction

‘Each story in The Long Swim, the latest collection from the interdisciplinary writer Terese Svoboda, begins with a tangled paragraph of striking sentences. Characters cross paths in unpredictably baroque relationships. Narrators find themselves on the edges of the action . . . paddling their way to the center of the plot. Call it amped-up in medias res, and take a moment to find your bearings. You have been gleefully tossed into the deep end.’—New York Times Book Review

‘Exquisite. . . .[Svoboda] crafts singular depictions of her characters’ inner worlds.’—Publishers Weekly

‘Whenever I want to remember the pleasures and the possibilities of language, I read Terese Svoboda. I am awestruck by what she can make live out of flat language on paper—loose lions, knife-wielding children, black hole men and vibrant nude women, adulterers and newlyweds and orphans, the legless dog joyfully buoyant on life's ‘long swim,’ the unspeakable griefs and joys that curtain our lives like ‘the pell-mell greeny rain.’ This new collection is a lightning storm, revelatory and galvanic—I love The Long Swim, and Svoboda’s crackling, hilarious, gorgeous prose-music.’—Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories and Swamplandia!

‘These stories, so precise and joyful in language and movement, don’t hesitate to dive meaningfully into heaviness and honesty. What musical and beautifully-written pieces to read aloud and savor.’—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

‘[This] collection is wry, often hilarious, and just as often sad, sad, sad. What a book! I admired the big and small surprises with each new gemlike tale. This is [a] confident collection that cultivates and builds on its own idiosyncrasy of vision. It makes a big promise and fulfills it entirely.’—Robin McLean, author of Pity the Beast

‘Terese Svoboda is a master of the dire and the blackly comic and a virtuoso of economy and voice, and The Long Swim features the jaunty and the wounded who in extremis maintain their wit and lacerating self-awareness. These survivors apparently believe that all trouble should be loud and bold, generating emotional histories that are like reports from a battlefield, but they nevertheless find their way, through their diminished toolbox for negotiating trauma, toward cooperation and mutual regard.’—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and The World to Come