The stories in Barbara Kremen’s wonderful and long overdue collection combine irresistible dynamic energy, and reflective equanimity. The characters find themselves in conditions they haven’t quite chosen. Their actions and destinies follow unexpectedly, with surprising, mysteriously elusive, or sometimes even fantastic resolutions. The narratives’ variety of perspectives propose motives as well as meanings, possessing the allure of puzzles or thought experiments, in which human experience may be small but the promised revelations are large.

Read the review by Emily Cataneo in the INDY WEEK.

In “The Figure in the Glass,” a photographic image of a man steps out of an entomology book, upending a musicologist’s career, when it hides in another book alongside a picture of a rare and beautiful Renaissance string instrument. In “Deceit of Snow,” a young couple on honeymoon in the Alps is lured to dangerous and implacable heights. In “The Bulbul Bird,” a patrician New England gentlemen loses his prized possession through the seemingly unrelated actions of his boarders.

In “Ponte Vecchio,” an old man, confused and alone, is adrift and lost in the storied streets of an ancient city. Amid undertones of growing anti-Semitism, a Depression-era family, in “One Summer in Maine” traveling Route One to Maine, spend a summer tinged alternately with magic and menace. In “The Damsel Fly” a man’s love for a damsel fly counterpoints with memories of his recently deceased wife, the hostility of his step-daughter, and his eventual discovery of the painful circumstances around his wife’s first marriage and his step-daughter’s birth.

In “Tree Trove,” a much lauded work first published in the Black Mountain Issue of St. Andrews Review, a fitful magic lures two children into a series of adventures and encounters, instigated by a cantankerous Princess Redbud, a hollow, misshapen tree, who sends them on a quest for help against her enemies. They journey inside a leaf to consult the wizard Beech Creature; Mimus Manytongues, a wiseacre poet mockingbird, recites his epic poem on fruits and seeds; a mischievous Windy Cloud whisks them through the sky to disperse the pollen grains; they flee to the protection of an ancient oak in a mystic wood and watch the masque of falling leaves. As the seasons pass they are led to discoveries, at once real and fantastic, about the life of trees, their differences in leaf and bud and bark, their inner structures, their growth and work, their enemies, their death.

These stories, told with irony and evocative power, grounded in place, implicate themes of inquirers and voyeurs, the conjunctions and disjunctions of species, the dispossession of age, and the beauties and distortions of imagination.

Barbara Kremen grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and later pursued graduate studies in English and French literature at Harvard University, the University of North Carolina and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has worked variously as a journalist, a teacher, a researcher and writer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, married for many years to Irwin Kremen, artist and psychology professor, now deceased.

During several years living abroad, in France and then in Switzerland, she devoted herself particularly to poetry; back in this country she began to write stories growing out of those experiences. In Durham, living with her husband and children, she developed an interest in the natural world and those scientists and naturalists exploring it in field and laboratory. Much of her fiction, with its strangely disorienting changes of perspective, is characterized by an exacting, yet imaginative, inquiry into the nature of reality through human lives and relationships in interaction with plants, animals, and insects. Implicit throughout many of her stories are themes of friendship and betrayal, the mystery of identity, the permutations of time, perceptions, and misconceptions.

7 x 10 inches, cloth hardcover with a sewn binding and heavyweight text pages, full color dustjacket. 270 pages.
$22.95 for one book, or $110 for a six pack (idea b eing keep one for your library, send others out to friends who are readers and would enjoy discovering a unique voice). Inquire for wholesale discounts.