Ice Age

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by Robert Anderson

University of Georgia Press

Due/Published November 2000, 200 pages, cloth

ISBN 0820322431

Winner of Georgia's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Leading us across a wide range of settings, from rural Texas to 1930s Spain to a Gulf War field hospital, Anderson shifts our view of the world to incorporate a set of intriguing characters slightly off-center. In the opening story, "Mother Tongue," Anderson merges fact and fiction to penetrate novelist Norman Mailer's psyche. In "Death and the Maid," a Texas family earns $300 per body from the county to bury vagrants and prisoners next to their home. In other stories, Jimi Hendrix makes his posthumous return to Los Angeles and Leonard Bernstein receives a letter from Catherine of Siena. A woman held prisoner beneath an unspecified American metropolis is rescued amid frenzied media attention but refuses to leave her sanctuary. As we are tossed from one bizarre circumstance to the next, Anderson's sophisticated, sometimes playful prose combines the concrete with the surreal to convince us that we know very little about the world we complacently inhabit.