News of the spirit

In "Live Bottomless," thirteen-year-old Jenny tells the painful and hilarious tale of her philandering father's fall from grace and the family's subsequent trip to Keys West as her parents attempt a "geographical cure" for their troubled marriage. In "The Southern Cross," Chanel, a girl of easy virtue and dubious reputation, chronicles her cruise around the Caribbean with three Atlanta developers. "I may be old, but I'm not dead," begins Alice Scully, scandalizing her retirement-home writers' group in "The Happy Memories Club." And prim, old-maid Sarah is titillated by the housekeeper's horrific account of her daughter's "blue wedding.". In "The Bubba Stories," Charlene Christian explains, "I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends"; but this legendary brother takes on a life of his own. Paula's damaged brother Johnny, in the title story, is "writing a new kind of book," constructing another narrative of his tragic life. Brothers, sisters, and friends appear in these stories as the narrators' other selves, offering other possibilities. Here we have news of the spirit, indeed: stories about longing and despair and imagination and grace, about love in all its strange and shifting forms.