Other Kinds

The stories in Other Kinds are about a place. They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.

In the nine short, satisfying stories of this fluid debut collection from Nice, strained moments of intimacy and misunderstandings appear along with the clipped prose, which is at times lyrical and, at others, sobering and stark. Often, as in Flat Land, Ice Floe, and Wet Leaves, boys from mining families, whose fathers said things that sounded like scripture, like it had all been thought about long and hard and decided upon, end up liking girls who come from different, warmer worlds. The results are conversations under streetlights and over beers that usually lead to unreturned phone calls and wishes for what wasn t meant to be. While each brief story flows into the next, it can be difficult to remember which was which or what really happened. Yet, although the long-term resonance of plot is thin, the immediacy of the words and images make for reading that is visceral and alive with the smell of rain and the pulse of silence. (Nov.) --Publishers Weekly

Dylan Nice's stories and essays have appeared in NOON, Indiana Review, MAKE, Hobart, Brevity, and Quick Fiction, among others. He lives in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.