Praise

Come the Tide

“… admirers of the short story will savour Come the Tide’s blend of the numinous and the normal. Like many of its characters, I could feel the sand between my toes, the glare of the sun in my eyes, and the pain of broken love. Come the Tide shows the world as an island in space, less hospitable and more unpredictable than we often like to think. The book’s aquatic settings emphasize the immensity of the sky at night and the power of the wind and the rain, so that the act of reading becomes an unusually visceral and enlarging experience. Readers will need to take a deep breath before they dive in.” — Review by Jack Messenger

“Nimble and effusive, the tales of Sam Reese’s Come the Tide are an aesthete’s paradise, moving from haunting snapshots toward often amorphous conclusions. There are bronzed commas of bodies, vines climbing walls like elaborate tattoos, and shadows that wrap around people like waves. Alluring metaphors test known locutions, as when a thaw carries the sound of a crackle, then a purr. ” — Review by Michelle Anne Schlinger

“A masterful collection that probes the role story-telling plays in both shaping and fragmenting our modern relationships. Throughout, the natural world looms large, the self ever threatened by tsunamis and earthquakes as Reese’s lean prose elicits a slow-burning dwam, taking the reader from moments of intimate detail to explorations of universal questions about the world around us.” — Lochlan Bloom, author of The Wave

“These elusive stories are deceivingly quiet and lushly sensuous;both familiar yet escapist.” — Lara Williams, author of Treats and Supper Club

“A collection of deep, intimate and melancholy stories, punctuated with moments of savage wit. These stories will continue to haunt you for the ways in which their mists, climates and atmospheres weigh on their protagonists, seeping into their closest moments. There is a consuming vision and talent on display in Come the Tide.” — Tim Corballis, author of Our Future is in the Air

“Reese’s prose feels intimate yet mysterious, like recurring encounters with the same stranger. Stories like these can make existence feel convincing, and creation worthwhile.” — Prabda Yoon, author of The Sad Part Was

“In these stories of subtle wonders, the turbulence of human relationships plays out at a human-scale while the threat of submersion or oblivion is always just beyond the page.” — Claire Dean, author of The Museum of Shadows and Reflections

Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness

“In the world of fiction,” Reese writes, “jazz can offer pathways for negotiating loneliness, or new perspectives that allow solitude to be seen as a positive, life-affirming experience.” This is his task: to examine those pathways. It turns out there are more kinds of loneliness than piano keys, and all of them find expression in the literature of jazz… This book is for scholars and curious readers with a whole-hearted penchant for jazz. It’s a worthy contribution and a reminder to the power of America’s most original musical art.” — Review by Jason Christian

The Short Story in Midcentury America

“By historicizing the short story genre, Reese opens up new critical perspectives on mid-twentieth-century American literature in a way that crucially differentiates it from the more familiar contexts of Cold War liberalism. This is a book that offers an original and compelling account not only of the specific short story writers under discussion here, but of U.S. cultural history more broadly.” — Paul Giles, author of The Global Remapping of American Literature

“Here is a study that looks at the defining yet elusive characteristic of short stories–their brevity–and, instead of measuring it in formalist terms (as most previous studies do), places it in historical context to explore the socio-cultural and political implications of form. The Short Story in Midcentury America is a focused, historically rich exploration of American short fiction.” — Kirk Curnutt, author of Coffee with Hemingway

“The growing international enthusiasm for the American short story will be further enriched by the appearance of The Short Story in Midcentury America.” — James Nagel, author of The American Short Story

“Reese offers a fresh perspective on authorial choice of genre and on the pressures writers who challenged social and political norms faced.” — C.E. O’Neill